


Eternal Life

by ant1que



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Genderswap, Immortality, Philosophy, Pre-Canon, Psychology, Romance, Suspense
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:35:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 40,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22132657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ant1que/pseuds/ant1que
Summary: The love for the children is a perfectly natural feeling. Why is it considered normal? One of my favorite and more artistic hypotheses is that we see them as an extension of ourselves. In a way we live our life through them and that renders us immortal. But then, when you are literally immortal such hypotheses stop making any sense. Then how does one go about living an eternal life? Well, he learns obviously… and one way of learning is through a teacher.
Comments: 30
Kudos: 52





	1. Chapter 1

* * *

It was early evening and a lone figure was approaching the gates of Konoha. The traveler was wearing a dark green cloak hence it was hard to see any distinct features. However, the guards on the gates were rather lax, thinking that this person was a civilian.

You see there are differences, in pretty much everything, when it comes to shinobi and civilians. One of major distinctions being the way one moves. The ninjas are used to move swiftly, even in everyday lives they do everything faster when compared to a civilian. That is one of the main reasons why the gate guards were, for the most part, relaxed.

In a complete silence cloaked stranger stopped in front of the shinobi. Slowly, the traveler reached inside of his clothes and held out a piece of paper. Not a word was uttered during the process.

The guard took the document and examined it. There are very few types of documents that one can show to be allowed to the Hidden Village. So, if it comes to an examination of one, the procedure is rather standardized. However, that piece of paper was anything but ordinary. The guard himself saw this type of document only twice throughout his entire career as a lookout, and both times the owner of the paper was none other than the wife of the Daimio of Fire Country.

He nudged his partner and nodded his head towards the document. It stated that a person named Marotabi Jusen is permitted to visit any part of The Fire Country. Of course, it was written in a fancy way but the form of speech was not important. The most significant part of the document was at the very end of it. The very part that made this piece of paper imperative – the golden seal of Daimio, rumored to have been made by the Uzumaki clan.

“Could you, please, state your purpose of visit?” said the guard, perfectly aware of his disability to deny an entry. The best he could do was to get as much information as possible and swiftly report it to the Hokage. 

The stranger, however, replied in a perfectly calm voice, “I am here to pay respects to my family, for they are buried here, in Konoha,” he paused for a brief moment, as if to consider his next words, then he continued, “I would also like to speak to Hokage but that could wait till morning.”

The guard decided not to push his luck, he said, “Welcome to The Hidden Leaf Village, we hope you’ll enjoy your stay.” He then returned the document.

Marotabi nodded his head and continued his way deeper into the Konoha.

The guard, however, was left with a lingering thought, “ _Why would a person who possesses the Daimio seal travel alone.”_ In the end, he decided not to think too hard about it.

“ _After all, it’s just a civilian,”_ was his last thought before he left for the Hokage tower.

Ten minutes after the encounter with the gate guards, Marotabi entered the hotel. He didn’t really care much for the name of it since his thoughts were rather busy lately. The whole transaction with a hotel staff floated past his mind and with that he found himself sitting on his bed, in the room he rented for the night.

“ _I am yet to think of a way to contact the jinchuriki_ ,” he thought to himself. “ _Barging into the Hokage’s office and demanding an audience with a person that is considered village’s secret weapon, is hardly an option._

_“The absurdity of the situation will increase exponentially when I declare that I want to talk to the Tailed Beast and not the jinchuriki,”_ he snorted with laughter. “ _There’s also a matter of this.”_

From under his clothes he drew an object. It was a wooden mask resembling a face of a demon. In a quiet and thoughtful voice, he said, “Now that I know your secrets, you are practically useless to me. What should I do w—”

He was interrupted by, what seemed to be, an earthquake. The mask vanished in a buff of smoke. Marotabi made his way through the window to the roof of the building. What he saw was certainly unexpected and that was an understatement.

Not quite far away from him a Nine-Tailed Fox was towering over the village. Marotabi thought to himself, “ _Well, It does make things easier…”_ another earthquake, obviously caused by the Fox, made him crouch to prevent himself from falling. _“… to a degree.”_

He swiftly jumped over the roofs in the direction of the fox.

* * *

Kushina was kneeling on the ground. The labor had made her extremely weak but still, she mustered enough energy to hold the fox with her chakra-chains. In truth, she was desperate, it was not supposed to be like that. She was supposed to have a successful labor and fox should have been resealed within her. Then she, her husband, and a newborn child, should have been home celebrating. Damn that masked piece of shit, let his soul suffer for all eternity for what he had done.

With her tired eyes she looked at Minato and saw that he started the technique that was supposed to use Shinigami as a mediator for the sealing. She herself knew little about it, although there was something lingering in her mind that she couldn’t quite catch.

She heard Minato speak to her, “Hold on a little longer, my love. I’ll split the fox chakra and seal the Yin part of it within myself. It’ll ease your strain.” She couldn’t respond for she had a hard time staying conscious.

From the corner of her eye she saw people in the ANBU uniform and the old man Sarutobi. They were gathered in half-circle behind the Minato. “ _Of course_ ,” she thought to herself, “ _The ritual cannot be interrupted, he must have put up a barrier—_ ”

Her thoughts were interrupted as she saw three figures in identical dark green cloaks. They were wearing similar masks that looked like a demon face. They went through the barrier as if there was none. Silently she started panicking, “ _Are they accomplices of the masked man?_ ”

One of the figures moved to Minato, the other went behind her, where the fox was chained. The last one kneeled beside her. Idly she thought to herself, “ _Clones…”_

She felt that it was much easier to hold the fox, but with that feeling a grim realization hit her. The stranger beside her was weakening her technique. That was the only explanation she could come up with, feeling his hand on her back.

She tried to resist, to threw his hand away, but her struggles were in vain for she was extremely tired. And so, her technique was dispelled and she collapsed on the ground. With her last bit of strength, she asked, “Are you… with the other… masked man?”

Her question was met with a smoke of the dispelled clone.

* * *

Minato was not calm… His actions were a wild combination of semi-good fortune and improvisation. Deep down he knew that he will die today, however he was much more worried for his child and wife. His hands were clasped together, the ritual has begun and fox’s chakra was separated and the Yang half was already sealed within his child, the next stage would be sealing Yin half within himself.

This mayhem was disrupted even more by 3 similar looking figures. He almost lost control over his technique when one of them turned around and stood before him. What stumbled him was the design of the mask the stranger in front of him was wearing. It looked exactly like the face of the Shinigami spirit behind him.

The masked stranger’s next actions rendered the Hokage speechless for he put his hands right over Minato’s. Almost immediately Minato felt that he lost control over the technique. He had never imagined that the pivot of the technique could be so easily switched. His confusion and panic grew even more when he realized what exactly the cloaked figure was doing. 

“ _He is sealing the Yin half within himself but the Shinigami is using my soul. If I don’t think of something, he will have half of the fox’s chakra for the price of my soul,”_ thought Minato.

The stranger, however, removed his hands from Minato’s. Slowly, he removed his mask. Minato was able to catch a glimpse of blood red eyes, before the very same mask was put over his face. What he saw next left him utterly perplexed for the stranger disappeared in buff of smoke.

“ _An Uchiha?_ ” was his last thought before he blacked out.

* * *

Kurama stopped struggling and closed her eyes. Despite being in a great pain after the chakra split, she felt it. A great deal of natural energy in a very close proximity. This energy was extremely ordered and structured in a very particular way. She didn’t feel something like that in a long time, in fact, she could have sworn that the last time she felt something similar was from her…

“ _Father…”_ she thought. At the same moment, she felt that sealing technique was disrupted, not only that but the chains that held her had disappeared too. Despite all that, her body was steady, rigid even, she didn’t dare to move a muscle, she feared to open her eyes.

“ _It can’t be him… I must be under a genjutsu…”_ she thought, and yet every perception organ she had practically screamed at her that someone so dear was right next to her. For even if it was her father, she feared to look at him and see a disappointment in his eyes. Several moments had passed and she felt that the enormous source of natural energy suddenly expanded and started stretching itself around her.

When she was just a child, she remembered being around her dad. His pure kindness that she learned to value as she grew older. However, her most vibrant memory of him was his aura. Every time she and her siblings were in the presence of the old man, his energy would surround them with a thin layer as if inviting to enter his soul.

Right now, she was experiencing a very similar feeling, yet a little different. It was more tangible, it had intention, it wanted her to be a part of it.

That was the final argument in Kurama’s struggle, hence she surrendered. And with that, what’s left from her chakra was transferred to the soul of a person who she secretly believed was her father.

* * *

Child’s cry was the only sound that could be heard on the battlefield. On the outside of the barrier, Hiruzen Sarutobi was wearing a very thoughtful expression, lots of questions were on his mind, “Who is this cloaked figure?”, “Was the sealing successful?”, “Are Kushina and Minato still alive?”.

“ _This stranger should be detained,_ ” he thought.

His people were ready to rush in and give whatever help they could. Something caught his attention. The stranger was facing Sarutobi with his back, but the old man gathered that the figure was forming a chain of hand-seals in preparation for an unknown technique.

The barrier fell. Immediately after that every spectator was blinded by blistering white flash. A moment passed and every listener was deafened by roaring thunder.

Sarutobi took a moment to compose himself. When he opened his eyes, the stranger was gone. No words could describe his bewilderment for he knew exactly what technique had just been used.

“ _Flying Thunder God… but that’s impossible,_ ” he thought. He vowed to think about it later, right now his people needed him. 

“What are you waiting for, move!” he said in a steady voice.

He was aware of the technique that Minato used to seal half of the Fox, that is why he was surprised to see the blonde’s chest slowly moving up and down, “ _Breathing…_ ” he thought.

He turned his attention to the medic who was attending Kushina. The medic signaled that she was alive too. It was imperative to organize their transportation to the hospital hence the orders were given.

One of the shinobi who were attending Minato moved towards Hiruzen. There was something in his hands.

“This mask was left on Hokage-sama’s face,” he said.

Sarutobi took the mask from his hands. He was familiar with the inspiration for whom the mask was modeled after. Idly, he moved his fingers along the pattern and across the eye holes.

“ _What is the meaning of this?”_ he thought to himself.

* * *

It is impressive how cemetery remains always quiet. It is even more impressive, how deafeningly silent it is during the natural disaster, which is understandable, since no living would honor the dead when their own life is threatened.

At that time of night, the cemetery grounds were devoid of living, thus there was no one to see the vibrant white flash, from which a man emerged in front of the Hashirama Senju’s grave.

Immediately, he took off his dark green cloak and threw it on the ground. With a flick of the wrist he set it on fire. He took several steps towards the gravestone and put his hand on it.

“Dear brother… Long time no see…” he said in a quiet voice.

He paused as if searching for the right words, then he continued, “I… So much has happened… Anyway, the whole night wouldn’t be enough to describe things that happened to me, nor do I believe that you can hear me. On the contrary, I’m quite sure that you cannot. Therefore, I can logically conclude that my actions are devoid of any logic…

“I miss you brother. However, this feeling is just a part of a bigger problem. I miss the communication. Not the society, no that’s not it. I need a very particular type of person in my life. I need someone who would understand my predicament… although such entities are rather unfriendly. And truth be told I understand them wholeheartedly.” He shook his head, understanding futility of his monologue.

He took his hand off the tombstone, “I should visit you more often.” He moved away from the grave and with his last glance on it he uttered, “So long.”

And thus, the cemetery was left to the dead once again.


	2. Chapter 2

The place was very… green. Not to say that it was bad, it was not just green, it was all kinds of green, except for the sky. The sky was nice shade of blue, with clouds all over it. If Kurama had to describe this place in one word, she would choose ‘peaceful’. To her, a place where one could experience tranquility was an unattainable pleasure to have, especially in recent times.

She didn’t have time to look around much, since she had lost a ton of chakra. Assuming she didn’t want to be in constant pain, she had to recover it and do it quickly. That is why, almost immediately after she had appeared in this place, she dived into a deep meditation.

Her chakra loss was a far cry from ordinary. When a mortal is stripped of the yang part of his chakra – he dies, since the very force that allowed him to physically exist is gone. The equivalent of emptying someone’s yang chakra would be obliterating one’s body into nothingness. Things are, however, a little different when it comes to Biju.

Although, their chakra consists of yin and yang, it is nearly impossible to divide it equally. Biju’s chakra is extremely mixed, it is so chaotic that their physical, real-world bodies consist partly of yin chakra. That is why Kurama’s body still had a tiny part of yang chakra. If she ever wanted to comfortably exist in the real world, she would have to nurture that part, which was not a quick process.

She didn’t know how much time she’d spent meditating. What she did know, however, was that at one point some other presence had appeared in this place. At first, when she realized that her piece of heaven was being disrupted by someone unknown, she grew a little irritated. Then, as she grasped that this other presence was hardly a disturbance, she calmed down. She guessed that it belonged to the owner of this place.

She’d decided to not pay him much attention and focus on recovery. In all honesty, she hated recovery and the reason for that was her first container. That ruthless woman had kept Kurama in a constant state of recuperation, never allowing to fully heal. To be precise, she was constantly pumping two tails worth of chakra through her body.

In a little irritated whisper, Kurama said, “No wonder that bitch, Mito, died so young.” What she was not expecting to hear was another voice.

“Well, I didn’t like her much too,” said the voice.

Startled, she halted meditation and opened her eyes. What she saw in front of her was a man in his mid-thirties. He had long and messy silver hair. His eyes were a bloody shade of red, a little darker than Uchiha’s Sharingan. His clothes were so white, it was painful to look at him, however, she deemed it not important. The more significant things she saw, or rather felt, were his hands and they were on her nose. Before she could object to that, she heard a loud thunder. It started raining.

Even though, the feeling of raindrops hitting her fur was relatively new to her, she paid it little mind for what she saw was making her uncomfortable. The rain was literally washing away the vibrant colors around her. The green was becoming dimmer and dimmer. She moved her eyes to look at the sky and saw that it was losing color too.

“What are you—” before she could finish the question, she felt it. A great deal of pure yang chakra rushing into her body. Immediately she composed herself and started guiding the chakra where it was needed most.

* * *

Slowly, he moved his hands away from her nose and looked around. He felt quite melancholic seeing that once lively place turned somewhat pale.

“ _That was nearly quarter of my yang chakra… That means a big ‘no’ to ninjutsu for, at least, a week,_ ” he thought to himself.

The surroundings were making him sick, he thought that it would be better to leave this place for the time being. However, now he had to account for an opinion of his unexpected guest. Just when he was thinking these thoughts, he heard a feminine voice, “You are not my father, are you?”

“No… no I don’t think I am,” he said. At the back of his mind he made a note to ask about this father figure some time in the future. His mind was persistently coming back to his surroundings, “How do you feel about that?” He motioned his hand around him.

“It looked better before,” said Kyuubi.

“ _That makes two of us,_ ” he thought to himself. “Do you have a human form?”

The Fox didn’t respond, but it seemed that the man didn’t need the answer. He turned around and made several steps forward, away from the Fox.

Unexpectedly a house appeared in front of him. It was quite a big house built in a traditional style of the Land of Fire. In the real world, houses of such sort were privilege of aristocracy.

Without a word he opened the front door and stepped inside, disappearing from Kurama’s sight. Almost immediately the door closed behind him with an audible click.

* * *

At first Kurama was baffled, then she became infuriated. Her first instinct was to demolish the house in front of her, however, she stopped herself. This man helped her, even shared his yang chakra but that didn’t make her less angry.

“Was that supposed to mean that you don’t want to know the answer?!” she shouted in an angry voice.

The house stood silent, no one responded to her. Somehow this silence was making her even more furious.

Her enormous body became a big pool of orange chakra. Slowly it started shrinking until finally it assembled itself into a form of a woman. She was wearing crimson yukata ornamented with golden foxes. Her hair was scarlet red, a tone lighter than her attire. Her skin was so pale, it looked like she was made of porcelain.

All that in combination with her golden eyes would have made her the most beautiful woman to have ever existed had it been not for her face. Oh, that face had such an angry scowl on it. That scowl in combination with her tensed posture, tightened fists, and a very deep and audible breathing – inspired terror.

With wide steps she stomped towards the door of the house in front of her. Her righteous fury made her formulate designer decisions on the fly, hence the door was kicked deep inside of a house.

She stopped one step short of entering the house. The source of her rage was standing right there, parallel to the flying door trajectory. He was holding a cup with a steaming beverage in it.

“So you do have a human form,” he said in a carefree voice. “Please come on in.” He turned around and motioned with his hand to come inside. “Would you like some tea?”

* * *

It’s been a day since the attack on village. The Hokage tower was one of the buildings that didn’t suffer any damages. Minato was sitting in his office, elbows on the desk, his hands were interlocked in front of his face.

To say that he had a lot on his mind is to greatly understate present situation. Quarter of the village was torn to shreds, countless casualties both among civilians and shinobi. Also, his son had been on the verge of becoming an orphan. He had already given orders to recover bodies and start rebuilding what was lost.

Tomorrow, he would have to attend the funeral and give a speech to those who lived through that fateful night. Although the transcript of the speech was laying on his desk, he was yet to read it. Truthfully, he didn’t remember half the things he had done that day. In fact, everyone who interacted with him saw that something was wrong but they wrote it off as a shock from the fight with the Biju.

Minato, however, was always true to himself. He knew exactly what was wrong, because from a moment he had woken up in the hospital he kept asking himself a single question.

“ _How am I still alive?”_

He thought about it repeatedly for he was certain that he should have died after that technique. At one point he even hypothesized that he did die and his current environment was the afterlife. He would still be driving himself insane, had it not been for the old man Sarutobi.

The old Hokage said that he could shed some light on what had happened during the sealing. He also insisted on Kushina’s presence during the discussion. That is why his wife was in his office too, sitting on the couch to his left.

He heard the knock on the door.

“Come in,” he said.

Slowly, the door opened and old man Sarutobi entered the office. He greeted Kushina with a nod, but she didn’t seem to acknowledge him, her attention was focused on her son, who was peacefully sleeping in her hands.

“You said, you have an explanation to what happened during the sealing,” said Minato.

“Not the explanation… no, certainly not explanation,” said Hiruzen. “A clue and some thoughts.” He moved to the Hokage’s desk and placed a wooden mask no it. Then he turned around and moved to the wall where the portraits of previous Kages were hanging.

The blonde immediately recognized the object before him. This was the mask that was put on his face during the ritual.

“What can you tell me about this thing?” said Minato.

“Before I answer that question, I suggest you to ask it to your wife,” said Sarutobi.

Minato turned towards Kushina. She had yet to acknowledge a visitor, she was holding a sleeping child in her hands and looked like she was somewhere else completely. He seemed to recall a report he’d read recently. It’d said that his wife, after she’d woken up, broke an arm and several rips to medical-nin who was attending to her.

“ _The idiots put her and Naruto into separate rooms,_ ” he thought.

He took the mask and slowly moved towards his wife. He kneeled beside her to catch her eye sight. Their eyes met and she seemed to snap out of her imaginary world.

“Hey... Kushina, I need your help, are you familiar with this thing?” he said quietly, trying to not disturb the child.

She took a good look on the mask. After several moments she said, “I saw masks like this in the western temple, when I was a kid.”

“What ‘western temple’?” asked Minato.

Hiruzen was the one to answer him, “The Uzumaki Temple to the west of Konoha.”

Kushina seemed to finally realize that she was ignoring someone’s presence, “Sarutobi-san, I’m sorry— “

With a slight raise of his hand he interrupted her, “I understand,” he said. “Let’s get back to the subject. I sent some people to check the temple. Judging by their report, one mask is missing, which means that this,” he pointed to the mask in Minato’s hands, “is likely to be from the temple.”

“’One mask’, you mean there’s more?” asked the blonde.

This time Kushina was the one to answer him, “I remember, Mito-sama telling me about them, she said that there is only one dangerous, the others are forgeries, but… umm… it was a fairytale.”

“A fairytale?” said Minato.

“I assure you, it was not,” said Hiruzen. He was looking at the portrait of the second Hokage, “In fact, my sensei believed this mask to have some sort of a secret, but Mito-sama outright refused to let him near the temple after he invented Impure Reincarnation.”

“I know about that technique,” said Minato thoughtfully. “I saw it in the Scroll of Seals.”

“Yes, it is a forbidden technique, in fact Mito-sama herself prohibited the usage of it, moreover she wanted to destroy it completely. Had it not been for the First, the technique would be lost,” said Sarutobi. “While we are on the topic of extraordinary techniques, I’d like to tell you one more clue that concerns our mysterious stranger.”

He was going to continue, but a knock on the door interrupted him.

Minato wasn’t expecting anyone, but he knew that if someone wanted to speak to him this far into the night, it was something important. In a steady voice he said, “Enter.”

The door opened and a shinobi entered the office. Minato seemed to recall him being one of the gate guards. The shinobi, after he looked around the office, grew timid.

“Hokage-sama… Sarutobi-sama… I’m sorry—” he was interrupted by Hiruzen.

“Don’t worry about the formalities, speak your mind, but keep your voice down; we don’t want to wake up a child, do we?”

“Yes, well…” he took a moment to compose himself. “Right before the disaster, there was a guest whom we let into the village. He had a document with the golden seal of Daimio on it. Here,” he passed a piece of paper to Minato. “This is everything we’ve managed to gathered about him.”

Minato took the report. There wasn’t much in it. A name ‘Marotabi Jusen’ and objective of visit ‘Visiting graves of relatives; visiting Hokage’. Usually this type of documents contained some kind of visual identification of the subject, however this time it was missing.

“How did he look like?” Minato decided to address the issue immediately.

“He was wearing a dark green cloak,” the guard hesitated, “we didn’t ask him to remove the hood. I wouldn’t bother you about him at all, but we checked the hotel where he had stayed and he wasn’t there. In case he died the Daimio should be notified.”

“I’ll see to it. Dismissed,” said Minato.

The shinobi nodded and left the office.

“Weird…” said the blonde. “I don’t remember setting a meeting with someone before the incident, besides I don’t believe there is anyone significant buried in Konoha with the clan name Jusen. I would be aware of someone who possesses the seal.”

“Let me take a look,” said Hiruzen.

Minato passed him the document.

“So, you were saying another clue…” said Minato, prompting the old man to continue. Sarutobi, however, was silent, he took the document and put it closely to the portrait of the Second Hokage.

“A jester… I see,” whispered Hiruzen. “No wonder you don’t know anyone significant with the clan name Jusen for there are none. There are, however, plenty with the name Senju. You probably know this particular Senju. After all, Tobirama is quite a unique name.”

“What do you mean?” Minato stepped closer to Sarutobi and took a closer look at the document next to a portrait. He immediately grasped what the old man had meant. “An anagram? Why would someone…”

Sarutobi moved to the door.

“Where are you going?” asked Minato.

Hiruzen waved the document in his hand, “He might have followed through with his purpose of a visit. I’m going to check the cemetery.”

“Do you think this is somehow connected to…” the blonde didn’t finish.

“Yes, I believe it is,” with these last words Hiruzen left the office.

“You should probably follow him,” said Kushina. She stood with the child in her hands, “We’ll be waiting you at home.”

Minato nodded and with a parting kiss he left the office. He quickly caught up with Hiruzen. Few moments later they were gone in a yellow flash.

* * *

The gold and the crimson collided in a battle of unimaginable scale. The opponents were equally matched, the fight was an extremely close one, that is why both sides were forced to use lies and deceit to continue. The scale was indeed impossible to imagine for it was so petty that the sole usage of word ‘scale’ is improper.

To put it simply, a man and a woman were sitting across each other and staring at each other’s eyes, both refused to blink first. Both refused to speak first. Both used a tea cup to deceive opponent and moisturize their eyes, moreover they were doing it simultaneously. And so, the silence prevailed… for a while.

Eventually, the man blinked. And with his blink Kurama’s face turned smug. Soon after that the man was first to break the silence, “I’m sorry for that little provocation.” He took a long sip of tea.

“You better be,” said Kurama. Idly she thought that the tea tastes quite good, “ _Weird,_ _how can I feel a taste in an imaginary world?_ ” then realization hit her. Immediately she voiced a question, “Where are we?”

Before the man could answer, she stood and walked to the window. She saw people slowly walking by on the street below. “Is this the real world?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the man. “Shukuba Town to be precise,” he sipped his tea, “that is if it actually tells you something.”

She hadn’t slightest idea where this Shukuba Town was, but that knowledge had little value to her right now. Kurama was so confused that she didn’t know what to ask.

“I’m sure you have lots of questions,” the man took the teakettle and poured some more tea in Kurama’s cup. “Please take a sit, I’ll try to describe things from my perspective. That should answer most of them.”

Kurama decided to comply for now, hence, she returned to her sit in front of that weird man.

“First of all, I should state that it wasn’t my intention to steal you from Konoha, in fact, it was an accident. There were two objectives I planned to accomplish and only one of them was concerning you. To put it simply I wanted to have a conversation with you, however, I must confess that I didn’t have a solid plan on how to go about that. Do you follow?” he stopped, giving the Kurama chance to ask questions.

“Yes,” she said. “What was the other?”

“The other?” he asked.

“You said, you had two objectives. You told me the one concerning me, what was the other one?”

“Ah… Right, I wanted to get my hands on a certain object. It was believed to have some sort of power over Shinigami.” He paused and drank some tea.

“Did you succeed?” asked Kurama.

“Of course, in fact, it was not even guarded. However, the thing has nothing to do with the Shinigami whatsoever. It serves as a key fragment in manipulating certain types of sealing techniques but that’s pretty much it.” He sounded a little disappointed.

“Why do you want to obtain a power over the Shinigami?” she asked with a hint of interest.

“I don’t, but we can get into that later should you wish so,” he took a moment to gather his thoughts, “So, I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room, thinking on how to approach the jinchuriki, when the earthquake hit. Obviously, it was you who caused it. Your location was quite noticeable, so I went straight to you. The rest you, pretty much, saw.

“After I hid everything what was left from your chakra within myself, I left the village. Then we’ve met in my inner world. You might have already guessed, but that rain, was me giving you a chunk of my yang chakra.” He stopped and sipped some more tea.

Kurama took the chance to ask a question, “Why did you want me to transform into my human form?”

“Well, first of all, I didn’t want you to transform into human form, I asked you whether you had one. What I wanted was you out of my inner world. Me giving you the chunk of yang chakra made it quite unstable. And since I didn’t seal you but merely let you coexist near my own chakra, you being there was quite uncomfortable.

“There is, however, a plethora of reasons why you shouldn’t be in a form of giant fox right now. One of them being that you probably can’t, since you are not fully healed. Another is that this room is too small to incorporate one giant fox. Also, people generally tend to react badly to giant foxes, and attention is not something we are seeking right now; that is to say, Konoha will probably search for us.” He stopped and looked thoughtfully into his cup.

There was a question Kurama wanted to ask for quite some time now, she decided to voice it now, “What do you want from me?”

Her question seemed to interrupt whatever thoughts this strange man had. Slowly he locked his eyes with hers and said, “That solely depends on your answer to a single question.”

“What’s the question?” she said.

“What do you want for yourself?”


	3. Chapter 3

The cemetery of Konoha was segmented in a very particular way. It was divided between civilians and shinobi, obviously not equally. The shinobi part of it, although much bigger, was split between clans. Each of them had their own traditions of burying the dead. That is why such segmentation was necessary.

Minato was walking behind Hiruzen and with each step his confusion grew. There was only one section of cemetery he visited sometimes, the clanless section. Despite its name, not every ninja buried there was clanless. Sometimes clans disowned their members hence why they ended up buried there. However, with all that said, these grounds had nothing to do with the Senju clan. With a side glance, Hiruzen noticed Minato’s confusion.

“Surprised?” he asked.

“I assumed we were walking towards Hashirama’s grave,” said Minato.

“And you were correct in that assumption,” said Hiruzen. “What you don’t know, however, is that Hokage cannot be buried within the grounds that belong to his or any other clan. That is the law and it includes me, you and everyone who is going to acquire that title. Can you guess why?”

“Perhaps, a symbolic meaning?” asked Minato.

“Indeed,” said Sarutobi. “When a ninja becomes Hokage he doesn’t belong to a clan anymore, nor does he belong to himself…”

“He belongs to the village,” finished Minato with a thoughtful expression.

“Correct.” Hiruzen abruptly stopped, “It’s here.”

Minato had never visited First’s grave before, but now standing in front of it, he realized that even if he did, he would have probably missed it. There was absolutely nothing special about it, in fact, the gravestone was identical to the ones beside it barring the name.

Hiruzen, however, payed the gravestone little mind. What occupied his attention was a few steps away from the grave. A scorch mark on the ground. It wasn’t hard to recognize what was burnt there, since a little piece of dark green sleeve was left intact. He wanted to pick up the cloth, but Minato had beaten him to it.

“Impressive,” said the blonde.

“What do you mean?” asked Sarutobi.

Minato channeled a tiniest bit of his chakra through the cloth, revealing the mark of his infamous technique.

“When the ritual was about to end, I was able to put a mark on his sleeve,” Minato handed the cloth to Sarutobi. “That’s the reason why this piece of sleeve didn’t burn. What’s surprising is that he somehow knew about the marker on him. I would assume that this burnt cloak is a result of his precaution.”

“He knows the Flying Thunder God technique,” said Hiruzen. Seeing Minato’s surprised expression, he elaborated, “When you blacked out and the barrier fell, he used it to get away. That was the other clue I wanted to speak about in the office. What are the chances that someone stole the technique?”

“Pretty much nonexistent,” Minato was sure that the technique’s secrets were protected good enough. “Well, apart from myself there was only one person who knew how to use it,” Minato looked thoughtfully at the cloth. “ _And that person is dead,”_ he thought. Suddenly, his mind returned to the discussion he had minutes ago in the office, he felt like Sarutobi was guiding him to something.

“ _He mentioned_ _Impure Reincarnation… but they would need his DNA. The Second died somewhere in the Lightning Country and his body was never… oh no,”_ he glanced at the Sarutobi.

“I see that you’ve realized what I was hinting at,” said Sarutobi.

“You think that they brought Second back from the dead,” said Minato. “But even if they did resurrect him, their actions don’t make much sense. They could just let me die and let the Fox ravage the village. I’m not even mentioning the trick with the name and this burnt cloak,” Minato pointed to the scorch mark on the ground.

“You speak sound arguments, but let me tell you this,” Hiruzen took a moment to compose his thoughts, “Although, Edo Tensei summons another soul as a puppet, it is virtually impossible to fully control it. The stronger it was during the life, the more it’ll resist the control. I believe that everything you pointed out was the result of sensei’s will.”

“We are not ready to face another war,” said Minato. “Not after what has happened a day ago.”

“I’m not telling you to leave everything and go fight Kumo. For all we know right now, it might not have been them. What you should do, however, is to be extremely cautious with external politics.” Sarutobi turned around, “As for the matter with Daimio, I’ll see to it personally.” With that he disappeared in a vortex of leaves.

Minato felt a major migraine, with one hand he massaged his temple. “I seem to like this job less and less.”

* * *

Kurama squashed the urge to give an immediate answer. She understood perfectly well that her desires were rather simple when she was sealed. ‘Freedom’ was what she wanted and to her it meant breaking out of the seal.

She wasn’t sealed anymore. And with that, she found herself in a rough spot, where she didn’t really know what she wanted for herself.

However, it appears that her answer was not needed. This man did the same thing again, he waited a few moments and left the room. It was as if he didn’t expect her to answer him at all. That made her a little annoyed, but this time she remained calm. If that was another provocation, she wouldn’t fall for it again.

“ _Come to think of it, for the first time in the last century I’m in a real world and not in an immediate danger,_ ” she pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

Left alone in an almost empty room she started thinking unhappy thoughts. What if that man won’t come back? What if he was so disappointed with her not giving him an answer that he decided to leave?

She was so absorbed in her thoughts that when a cloth landed on her head, she let a startled cry and fell on her back. Quickly she tried to get up and she even half-succeeded, but then froze in a something that could, very vaguely, be called ‘battle stance’.

The very man she was thinking about was standing in front of her. He raised an eyebrow in a silent question.

“You saw nothing,” Kurama quickly composed herself. She took a closer look at the thing that was thrown at her. It was a dark crimson cloak. “ _Looks nice,_ ” she thought.

“Put it on and let’s go,” said the man. “We need to be at the eastern gates of the city in ten minutes.”

“Where are we going?”

“Water Country,” he said. “Due to current political situation there, Konoha will have a hard time following us officially.”

“What’s happening there?”

“A civil war is about to start,” he gestured her to hurry up, turned around and started leaving.

Hastily she put the cloak on herself and followed him.

When they reached the door of the house, he stopped and turned around, “One last thing… You’re a royalty.”

“What?” she asked surprised.

“That is your legend,” he reached and put her hood on. “Your looks are quite telling. And being a royalty justifies them completely,” he smirked. “Also, since you never introduced yourself, I’ll be referring to you as ‘princess’.”

She wanted to protest and say that he didn’t introduced himself either, but she never had a possibility.

“Hurry up, princess.”

With these words he went outside and she followed.

* * *

Kushina was tired, recent events were keeping her from getting a good night of sleep. She was extremely worried for her newborn son. What if the enemy attacks again? If that was ought to happen then her son would be the primary target, since the damned fox was sealed inside of him.

Her anxious thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door. It was not your usual polite knock at the door. It was loud and demanding, as if sending a message: ‘I will enter whether you want it or not.’ There had been very few people who could allow themselves behave like that. Kushina wasn’t thinking about these people on her way to the door, she was too tired for that. She knew, however, one thing for certain: whoever is behind that door, she would smack that person into oblivion.

With that thought in her mind, she opened the door ready to attack an unexpected visitor. What she certainly wasn’t expecting is to be attacked first. Oh, what an attack that was… Her opponent surely knew a thing or two about the right grip. Kushina tried to struggle but her attempts were futile. Horrified, she realized that the grip was only a distraction, her opponent was aiming for her respiratory system. In a way she was being choked.

Although, she understood that, it was already too late. With her last breath she uttered, “Tsunade… can’t… breathe.” With these words, the grip on her loosened and she was able to get a good deep breath.

The merciless attack—also known as a ‘hug’—was conducted by a blonde woman who looked like she was in her mid-twenties. However, Kushina knew that it was a masterful illusion for that woman was almost twice her age.

Tsunade Senju was known as the strongest kunoichi, she was also renowned for her outstanding medical skills, however, to Kushina she was—first and foremost—a friend.

Before Tsunade was able to say a word, Kushina pulled her through the entry hall and into the room where Naruto was sleeping. The blonde immediately understood what was needed, hence she hovered her hand engulfed in green chakra, over the newborn.

“He’s as healthy as he could possibly be,” she stopped and looked at Kushina.

“Are you sure, maybe—” whatever Kushina was about to say was dismissed. This time Tsunade was the one pulling Kushina out of the room and into the living room. They stopped near the couch.

“Sit,” said Tsunade.

“I’m fine, you should—”

“I said, sit!”

Kushina was forced to oblige. She didn’t really understand how exhausted she was until after Tsunade started transferring her chakra. Kushina felt as if during a hot summer day, someone put her in a cold comfy bed. That was how Tsunade’s chakra felt and this feeling overwhelmed her.

“Tsunade…” she said in a dreamy voice. “I’ll take a little nap… could you, please… look after…” with that she was asleep.

“Dummy,” whispered Tsunade.

* * *

They were traveling inside a coach. She’d managed to overhear that this was a trade caravan whose destination was the Land of Noodles. At first, she was a little anxious, since she didn’t want to interact with humans, but as it turned out she didn’t need to. The man who helped her took care of everything. Even the coach itself was left for the two of them.

Kurama valued names a lot. It’s not surprising, since it’s the only thing her father left to her. During one of the conversations this man had with one of the caravan humans, she’d managed to overhear his name – ‘Tobirama’. That made her feel like a thief. That is why she tried to distract herself. In trying to do so, her mind returned to the question Tobirama asked her earlier. The one she didn’t answer.

“I don’t know,” Kurama mumbled.

Although, she spoke quietly, the man sitting in front of her was able to hear her well. He turned his head towards her, silently prompting to continue.

“About what I want…” Kurama hesitated, “How… how do I know?”

“That is a very broad question,” he turned his head to the window. “And a very nostalgic one at that,” he smiled.

For several minutes he was silent. Just when Kurama thought that he ignored her question he spoke, “Throughout your life…” he threw her a side-glance, “… you had experiences. Some of them were good, some of them – not quite to your liking.”

Kurama cautiously nodded.

“If I were to give an advice,” he continued. “I’d say think of those experiences, find one that made you feel joy and one that made you feel miserable.” He turned his head to her, “Those two memories will have something distinct in common. The happy one will contain this ‘something’ in abundance, the other one will be completely devoid of it. This ‘distinct something’ is exactly what you seek.”

Kurama decided to try that. Her joyful memory was about her family, she remembered how blissful her life was when her father was alive. Then she thought about the unhappy ones. She smiled bitterly, thinking that she had plenty of those. She decided to go with the most recent. The time when she’d broken out of the seal.

She started analyzing those two memories. She remembered that Uchiha that used his eyes to control her. She hated Uchiha. Was that it? She was happy when Uchiha didn’t exist, and now there’s a lot of them. “ _No, no… it’s supposed to be the other way around,”_ she thought.

She tried thinking of something she had during the happy phase of her life. Immediately, she thought of her father. He was the one who’d made her life joyful. “ _And when he died… everything went awry,”_ she thought. However, this was too specific, she needed something else, since she couldn’t bring back the dead.

She tried to think of something that her father had, that she was lacking now. Almost immediately it clicked, she had the answer. She looked at the man in front of her. He was watching her intently as if waiting for her to speak.

“I—”

“Whatever your answer is…” he interrupted her.

“ _He did that on purpose,”_ she thought annoyed.

“…keep it to yourself,” he said. “This knowledge that you now possess, has an extreme value. To you it’ll shape your future goals. To everyone else, it is something that will be used to manipulate you. So, unless you trust someone completely…”

He closed his eyes and leaned back deeper into the seat. His pose was signaling the end of the discussion. However, Kurama didn’t feel like it.

“What makes you think that I don’t trust you?” she blurted out.

“Well, for one,” he spoke with closed eyes, “You are yet to introduce yourself, princess. Also, if I were you, I wouldn’t trust—”

“Kurama.”

“Where?” he opened his eyes and moved closer to the window. “How far are they?”

“Who?” she was confused.

“Kurama,” he said.

“What?”

Now Tobirama was confused, but he decided that now was not the time to talk. “ _I was not expecting Konoha to react so quickly,”_ he thought.

A moment later, Kurama felt a strong pulse of natural energy, she recognized that the source of it was the man in front of her. Several moments passed, then he spoke, “I don’t feel any members of the Kurama clan in a proximity. Are you sure you felt them?”

“Kurama clan?” she frowned.

Tobirama shot her a puzzled look, “One of Konoha’s oldest clans… What did you mean by mentioning them?”

“Nothing…” she hesitated, “it was nothing…”

Tobirama made a mental note to refresh his knowledge on Kurama clan, but for now he decided not to press.

* * *

The undergrounds of Konoha had their purpose. This particular part of them was quite special. Its purpose was not a public knowledge, but even those who knew it’s secrets were hesitant to visit it. Fortunately, Sarutobi was not one of them. He was walking through the corridor, the walls of it were shaped like shelves, but he was not interested in their contents. He was walking to the door at the end of the corridor.

With a firm intent, he opened it and entered the room. He didn’t waste time to look around for he was interested in a person that was currently in the room. That person was facing him with his back.

“I have a job for you,” said Hiruzen. “Orochimaru.”


	4. Chapter 4

Kurama was slowly walking through the forest, the man named Tobirama was moving slightly ahead of her. It’s been two days since they left Shukuba Town and a day since they left the caravan. She didn’t want to leave caravan but the man insisted that they should be cautious, hence they were now moving on foot. Although she agreed, the situation itself had made her reflect on her recent behavior. With that she reached an unhappy conclusion: she was too compliant.

She didn’t have any guarantees that this man wasn’t leading her into a trap. It is true that he helped her, but he himself had stated that it was an accident. His reasoning was quite shady too. He’d avoided answering her question about his motive. That thought made her halt. How many times was she deceived and betrayed like that? She decided to act upon these thoughts immediately.

“I’m not going.” Her voice was firm. She braced herself expecting the man to be angry. Her eyes were locked on his back, she was ready to act whatever his reaction might be. Well… she thought that she was ready.

Usually when you think that you are ready for everything, in that precise moment something unexpected happens. That is exactly what happened to Kurama. Yeah, it’s true that she was ready for everything, however ‘everything’ meant to her at the very least ‘something’. What she was not expecting was ‘nothing’. And that was precisely what she encountered. Nothing, absolutely no reaction whatsoever. In fact, the man didn’t even look around. He continued walking as if she didn’t say a word. That reaction— or rather the absence of one—made her feel uneasy.

“Hey!” she exclaimed to get his attention. “Did you hear me? I said that I’m not going with you.”

“I heard you well.” He stopped and turned around. “What do you expect from me? An approval?”

“Of course, not…” She was expecting a different kind of reaction. “You won’t stop me?”

“Why would I?” He raised an eyebrow.

Kurama didn’t respond, she didn’t know how to react or what to do next. When Tobirama started turning to continue his way, she started panicking. 

“Wait!”

That made Tobirama stop. If anything, she succeeded in catching his attention once again.

“I… Why…” She didn’t know why she stopped him. “You said you wanted to ask me something, right?” she blurted.

“Ask you something…?” His expression turned thoughtful.

“In that town two days ago, you said that you wanted to get something from Konoha and have a conversation with me…”

“Oh, right.” He nodded. “I did say that, however, I don’t want it anymore.”

“What!? Why!?”

“Ah, I guess I made myself unclear.” He frowned. “Let me rephrase that. I wanted to have a conversation with someone else. What I mean is that I imagined you differently and because of that my expectations were different too.”

“You imagined me differently? Different how? A blood-thirsty monster?” She said in the bitter voice.

“No… not at all,” he said. “I imagined you as an immensely wise being who—after some negotiations—would enlighten me on something. To be more specific, I wanted to know about interactions between immortals and human society. In a way I was seeking guidance or, maybe, a teacher of sorts.”

“So, you wanted me to teach you?”

“That is what I had in mind, yes. However, after I’ve spent some time with you, I can conclude that you haven’t a slightest idea on how to interact with human society. If anything, you seem to need a teacher even more than I do.”

“I…” his words stirred something deep inside of her. “How do you know that?”

He crossed his arms on his chest and leaned on the tree. 

“Your human form indicates that at some point in the past you tried to interact with the society. Not only interact, but assimilate into it. However, judging by your looks, this interaction wasn’t a lasting one. You look too good to be true.”

With those words, Kurama felt a little ache in her heart. It was dim, but just enough to remember her first attempt at socializing. Meanwhile, Tobirama continued.

“At first, I thought that you tried to pose yourself as a royalty, with your looks it would be easy to marry into some sort of a royal family and eventually take over it. Then I saw your reaction to people of caravan. I imagined that you would see them as inferior class, I expected to see arrogance on your face, maybe a little loathing. That would have served as a confirmation to my little hypothesis. However, I certainly didn’t expect you to be… _scared_?”

The more he spoke the more memories were arising in Kurama’s mind. They were painful memories. 

“Obviously, that observation shattered my previous assumptions. What I now know for sure is that you are wary of humans. And that makes me think that during your interactions with the society you’ve encountered the darker parts of human nature, like envy, hatred, and fear. That is why I believe that you are not suited for—” he abruptly stopped.

Kurama—even though she was quite old by human standards—wasn’t knowledgeable about emotions. She was never taught what they mean or how to control them. That is why she had a hard time understanding why his words hurt so much. She didn’t know why he stopped talking or why he was now moving towards her, she also didn’t know why he looked blurry or why her cheek felt wet. She tried touching it with her hand, only to find out that it was now wet too.

* * *

Tobirama had little experience with crying women. His life had always been centered around his research. He was rarely interested in the social part of it. But even then, he was familiar with situations when an individual needed a shoulder to cry on. In fact, those circumstances were quite common during war times. The situation he found himself in, however, was quite a few degrees more complicated.

Tobirama wasn’t considerate with his words and he acknowledged it. This, however, was a habit he had. He was used to speaking his thoughts out loud, stating facts, and thinking about emotions afterwards. He recognized that he might have caused her a mental breakdown.

His mind was occupied for the last few days, that is why he kind of forgot that it was no ordinary woman standing in front of him. He saw that her mental unease caused her to lose some of the control over the human form. Which is why he was met with vertical pupils staring through him, as if he was not standing right in front of her.

He didn’t hesitate a moment, he embraced her. It was not hard, since she was a head shorter than him. Instinctively, she hugged him back. And with that her composure was gone. She started weeping, her breathing grew more audible, her body was quivering. Tobirama felt her tears soaking his clothes. Gently, he was running his hand through her hair, trying to calm her down.

He didn’t know how long they had been standing like that. He didn’t know what to say or to do next. His thoughts were interrupted by Kurama’s voice.

“I…” her voice was quivering. “I… can’t… control it.”

“Take it easy.” It was obvious to Tobirama that she was struggling. “We are not in a hurry, take a moment to compose yourself.”

Kurama took a deep breath. She seemed to calmed down a little. “I can’t control how my human form looks.”

“That explains a lot of things.” He said thoughtfully. “Then, I think it is safe to say that whatever you’ve encountered because of your human form, was not your fault.”

These last words seemed to calm her down. However, when Tobirama tried to pull away her embrace only tightened.

“Don’t leave me.” She said hurriedly. “I’m sorry, I’ll go with you.”

Tobirama stopped to process her words. He decided that he should probably make an effort to speak more clearly. “You have nothing to be sorry about. Your concern is understandable, since I never stated my motives… up until now, that is.”

“You’ve implied that you don’t need me.” She was speaking against Tobirama’s chest.

“I have, but that doesn’t mean that I’ll leave you.” He paused thinking on how to convey his thoughts more clearly. “What I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t think of yourself as being useful or useless. Try to be more selfish, think more about what you want.”

“After my father died,” she spoke quietly, “I’ve always felt threatened. I… I want to stop feeling that. I want to feel safe.”

“Look at me,” he said to her. She raised her head; her eyes were puffy. “Would you like me to teach you, Kurama?”

She bobbed her head in agreement.

“ _Wait… How does he know my name?”_ she thought. “You bastard,” she smiled. “You were making fun of me in the carriage.”

“A little bit,” he smirked. “I had to get a win after my shameful loss at the house.”

Kurama chucked, “So, it’s a tie now.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to make it into a win. Should we get going?”

“Can we stand like this for a little bit.”

“Sure,” he said. “As long as you want.”


	5. Chapter 5

Sleep is an essential part of shinobi’s life. When they sleep, the yin part of their chakra recovers. It is easier to think of the lack of yin chakra as a ‘mental strain’. So, to avoid it they need sleep. In theory, it is entirely possible to live without sleep by getting your yin part of chakra refilled externally. When it comes to Biju, ‘in theory’ becomes ‘in reality’. Tailed Beasts cannot deplete their yin reserve by themselves which is why they lead a sleepless way of life.

Unkei Ida was no Biju, he was not even a shinobi. He was a civilian in his late sixties, a resident of Wave. The man had quite a peculiar hobby. Once a year he prepares a week worth of food, takes a boat and sails far into the sea, in the direction of Water Country. He sails further and further until his home country is nowhere to be seen. Then he stops and starts fishing. This event of sorts, provides him with an opportunity to be alone with his thoughts, and away from his everyday problems.

Right now, he was in the middle of this annual event. He was sitting with the fishing rod in his hands, patiently waiting. Something, however, was making him anxious. At first, he’d tried to distract himself but the feeling didn’t go away. He started searching for what was causing him distress. Several minutes passed and then it hit him. The boat… It wasn’t shaking. The sea was always turbulent but right now it felt as if he was fishing in the middle of the pond. And indeed, after he took a cautious look around, he saw that the sea was still. He couldn’t believe his eyes. “ _How is that possible!?”_ he thought.

A moment after, something else caught his attention. He heard someone talking. He turned his head in the direction of that sound. Quite a distance away from him, he saw two cloaked figures walking on water. One was wearing vibrant white and the other crimson red. The white one was actively gesturing, obviously being the source of the voice. It was hard to hear from such a distance, but Unkei was able to recognize several words: “…hate… hurt… kill half of them…”

“ _Demons!”_ thought Ida. He wasn’t a religious person, but right now he could see everything with his eyes and hear with his ears. He was sure that ordinary people couldn’t make sea still or walk on water. Ida was an old man, he wasn’t afraid of death, in fact he was quite a courageous person. That is why he was not afraid to make a noise, with the use of his oar he hurried turning his boat towards the Wave.

“ _I have to warn the others!”_ he thought. He took last glance in the direction where he heard the voice. He saw that both figures stopped and the crimson one was pointing at him. If anything, that made him move even faster.

* * *

The situation in the forest had made Tobirama aware that his companion had very little knowledge about emotions. That is why he decided to give her a crash course on basic human empathy. Therefore, he was continuously speaking throughout their journey, only occasionally pausing to check whether Kurama was still listening.

They passed Wave half an hour ago and, right now, only a part of the sea was separating them from the Water country.

“…now, when it comes to darker emotions, ‘hate’ is the more prominent one.” He was sure to emphasize key words. “However, what most individuals don’t realize is that in nine out of ten cases the origin of hate is ‘hurt’. For example, let’s say there’s a group of people, not necessarily a clan, but a group that has family ties. If you kill half of them, the other half will be hurt. Not physically, but mentally. That ‘hurt’ will cause them to hate you.”

Kurama nodded. She was absorbing information like a sponge. Her newfound teacher was very interesting to listen to.

“The things I’m telling you, although might appear knowledgeable, are just words. I’m sure that most of those things you had already known. You should always keep in mind that the best way to understand emotions is to experience them. No amount of words will substitute for the actual feeling. At the end of the day, words are just tools. They are a way to convey information to the other individual or structure knowledge in one’s mind.” Tobirama frowned. “I guess, I’m making things too complicated. What I’m trying to say is that you already have those experiences stored as memories. Try reflecting on those memories with my words in mind. I’m sure that—at the very least—you’ll see things more clearly.”

His words rang true but Kurama wasn’t ready to dive into her memories. She vowed to do it a little bit later. Her train of thought was interrupted by a certain feeling.

“I feel fear.” She stopped.

“Huh?” Tobirama looked at her puzzled.

“There,” Kurama pointed in the direction of a boat. “Someone is scared on that vessel.”

“Probably a civilian,” Tobirama continued walking. “Civilians are separated from shinobi by a thick wall of ignorance. Whoever is on that vessel, they’ll probably convince themselves that it was all a dream by tomorrow morning.” Kurama followed.

For several moments there was silence between them, Tobirama was the first to break it.

“That’s a very impressive ability.” He looked at Kurama. She didn’t understand what he was talking about. “Your empathy,” he elaborated. “Being able to sense emotion from such a distance… Can you feel every emotion this way?”

“Ugh… well… kind of… I…” the question was making her anxious. “I might be able to feel them all, but…” she hesitated. “…I have the most experience with fear.”

“I see,” Tobirama recognized that she was uncomfortable answering that question. He made a mental note to address that issue later. “So, as I was saying earlier hurt is the origin of hate. In fact, hurt is usually the origin of most of the negative emotions. Lust for revenge is another great example.”

* * *

Orochimaru’s situation was of a binary nature. The question was simple, yet to Orochimaru it entailed a certain degree of complexity. To defect or not to defect? He’d been given a task to track whoever was behind the Fox incident, which meant that now was the perfect opportunity to leave. However, old man Sarutobi hinted that there was quite a big probability of war with either Kumo or Iva. “ _Or both?”_ he thought. That made him reconsider his not-so-patriotic choices.

You see when there’s a war there’s also spoils of it. And to Orochimaru spoils of war often looked like human and were in possession of a peculiar kekkei genkai. If he were to defect and take over Oto, he would have to deal with lots of country related politics. Not only that, but in the context of three-way war the location of Rice country was quite an unfortunate one. The country would either be a mediator or a battlefield and Orochimaru would have to deal with that as both daimio and Otokage. Even thinking about that, was giving him a headache.

After all, he’d decided to wait. He would pretend to track that mysterious attacker. To Konoha it would look like he is making an effort, while in reality he would just check on his long-term projects. One of such projects was in the Water country, where he was headed. As of right now, he was in the Wave country. He wasn’t in a hurry hence he was slowly walking completely engulfed in his thoughts.

“Demons!”

A loud voice caught Orochimaru’s attention. He glanced in the direction of the voice. A man was standing on a wooden box. He was surrounded by the crowd.

“I saw them! We need to be ready; there will be lots of refugees!”

Orochimaru tugged closest civilian. “What’s he talking about?” he pointed at the elevated man.

After all genetic modifications Orochimaru had done to himself, he had rather unusual look to him. His pale skin and golden eyes with slitted pupils made him look quite predatory. It is no wonder that this poor civilian was scared shitless when he was pulled so suddenly.

“O-o-o… old… man Unkei…” his voice was shaking, “… he says that demons are going to destroy half of Water country.”

Orochimaru was used to this kind of reaction to his looks, hence he paid it little attention. The situation in Water country was a badly kept secret too. There will be civil war in the country between those who hold kekkei genkai and those who don’t. So, it was safe to say that half of country’s shinobi population will be eradicated.

“He’s not wrong,” Orochimaru mumbled to himself. He ignored the civilian and continued walking towards his destination. At the back of his mind he noted that—for some reason—now there were two voices shouting word ‘demons’.


	6. Chapter 6

  


Minato was waiting in his office. He was standing in front of the window, his gaze aimed at the Mount Hokage. In particular, he was eyeing face of the Second.

  


“ _Was it really you?”_ he thought.

  


The memories of past days were still vivid in his mind. The village was in the process of mending its wounds. Minato had done everything he could to reinforce that process and currently it didn’t need his interference anymore. With that, he was able to finally normalize his sleep schedule and spend some time with family.

  


However, life of the Hokage is not an easy one, it is full of hardships. Minato’s current cause of hardships was in a form of a single sheet of paper, which was lying on the desk right behind him. The paper in and of itself was quite an ordinary one; it’s the content that was causing him a headache.

  


The document was a short notice from the ambassador of Kumo. It said that they would like to discuss peace treaty and would be in Konoha by tomorrow morning.

  


“ _What a convenient timing,”_ thought Minato. Words of the old man Hiruzen were ringing in his head. “Be cautious with external politics,” he mumbled to himself. “Well then, I’ll do exactly that.”

  


Just as he said that, there was a knock at the door.

  


“Come in.”

  


The door opened and two people entered the room. They were very well-known people in Konoha, for they oversaw two strongest clans, before Minato stood Fugaku Uchiha and Hiashi Hyuga. In a complete silence, the blonde gestured them to read the document on the table.

  


For a moment two most famous dojutsus flashed. With that, Minato was sure that the content of the document was completely grasped by them hence he started talking.

  


“Fugaku, as a head of Konoha Military Police Force you are to oversee this enemy unit,” although Minato’s voice was quiet and steady, Fugaku was confused by his choice of words.

  


“Enemy unit?”

  


“Make it look like they are welcomed as ambassadors, at the same time be ready to capture or kill them should they as little as look in the direction they’re not allowed to. This whole situation is to be treated as the continuation of the Fox emergency, which is why…” he glanced at the corner of the room. “Inu.”

  


A kneeled Anbu in the mask of a dog appeared before Hokage.

  


“For the duration of this event, ANBU unit is to obey Fukagu’s orders. His words are my words,” said Minato.

  


“Understood.”

  


“Dismissed.” The kneeled Anbu disappeared.

  


“An authority over ANBU?” Fugaku was stunned. “Isn’t it a bit of an overkill?”

  


“Actually…” Minato trailed; he was biting a nail of his thumb. Fugaku thought that Minato was considering backing down. That is why what happened next left him utterly speechless.

  


“Here, take this,” Minato took out a three-bladed kunai from his back pouch. Both clan heads knew what it was.

  


Seeing as Fugaku was silently comprehending the magnitude of his current status, Hiashi decided that now was the time to ask a question. “Am I allowed to know why you are so paranoid about this?”

  


“Of course,” Minato nodded. “The current state of affairs will be discussed during the Clan Gathering, which will be held the day after tomorrow. To give you a gist of it… There are certain clues that point to Kumo as the mastermind behind the Fox attack. That is why I asked you here too, Hiashi.”

“I’m listening.”

  


“Right now, is a perfect opportunity for Kumo to attack us with the main forces. Hence the question: Why are they sending here such a small unit?” The question, apparently, was addressed to no one. “Personally, I can think of two reasons. First, they want to assess the damages. Second, they want to secure the asset.”

  


“You mean…” Hiashi trailed.

  


“Yes. They wanted to steal byakugan during war, I don’t think their appetite changed. If anything, I think it might have grown stronger.” Minato shot a pointed look to Fugaku.

  


“Fugaku,” said Hiashi. “I propose, we cooperate during that mission.”

  


“Agreed.” Fugaku didn’t hesitate a moment, the situation was beyond serious. “Anything else?”

  


Minato shook his head and turned to the window. His visitors left the office. He was once again eyeing the monument.

  


“Will it be enough?” he muttered.

  


* * *

  


“Are you hungry?” asked Tobirama.

  


They’ve finally reached their destination. The border town of the Water country was right in front of them. The question made Kurama a little confused.

  


“I don’t need food to sustain myself.”

  


“Well, that’s not what I asked.” Tobirama shot her a piercing look. “Actually… When was the last time you’ve eaten human food?”

  


Kurama took a moment to think about it. When was the last time she’d eaten human food? Certainly not this century. Hmm… What about before? She frowned, diving deep into her thoughts. She did try it, right?

  


“Hmm…” she touched her lips with an index finger. After a few moments of intense concentration, she got it, “I don’t remember.”

  


“Oh wow,” Tobirama was surprised with that answer. “Then it is settled, we feast today.”

  


“But why?” said Kurama. “Aren’t you just like me? Why do you need human food?”

  


“I don’t,” Tobirama shook his head. “Still, I can enjoy the taste,” he paused and frowned. “You can taste it too, right?”

  


Kurama nodded in agreement.

  


It was not long after, that they found themselves in a diner. The place was rather quiet and neat. Each table was separated from one another with a paper wall. Tobirama chose a table closer to the exit door. He positioned himself so that he had a vision over the door in case someone unexpected was to show up. Kurama sat directly opposite to Tobirama, her back was facing a paper wall.

  


Soon, the waiter came carrying a menu.

  


“Don’t bother with that,” Tobirama pointed to the menu. “We’ll have one of each dish you have.”

  


“One of each!?” the waiter was dumbfounded.

  


“Trust me, we are very hungry.”

  


The waiter nodded and went to the kitchen. He returned several minutes later carrying two dishes. He proceeded to put them on the table. The bowl in front of Kurama contained steaming rice, while the one before Tobirama had noodles in it. Next, he put a set of chopsticks beside each dish.

  


“Enjoy your meals,” he said and left.

  


In one move Tobirama tore the paper packaging on the chopsticks and broke them apart, then he started eating. He took a mouthful of noodles and started silently chewing. He elevated his gaze to see what Kurama was doing. To his surprise she wasn’t eating. She was looking to her right. Tobirama tracked her line of sight. What he saw there was an ordinary civilian, eating—what looked like—the same dish that Kurama had in front of her.

  


Tobirama once again turned his gaze to Kurama. She wasn’t looking at that civilian anymore. Her eyes were fixed on Tobirama’s hand. He took a look at his hand. There was nothing wrong with it. He was still holding a pair of chopsticks, pinching a noodle from his bowl. He started to get a hang of what might have been wrong. Still, he decided to double-check.

  


“What’s wrong?” asked Tobirama.

  


With those words Kurama turned her gaze to the side and started mumbling, “…I… um…” she was extremely embarrassed right now, “I don’t know how—”

  


Before she could finish, Tobirama stood, took his dish, and moved to her side of the table. Now he was sitting beside her.

  


“Look at me,” he said. Kurama turned her head to him. “You hold them like this.” The palm of his hand with chopsticks was facing Kurama. “The bottom one is always still; you move the top one with three fingers. Try it.” He nodded towards her set of chopsticks.

  


She decided to do just that. Carefully, she removed the paper packaging and broke them apart. She tried holding them. It wasn’t very comfortable.

  


“It won’t be comfortable at first, but you’ll get used to it eventually,” said Tobirama.

  


“Thank you,” her voice was almost inaudible.

  


“You’re very welcome,” said Tobirama, yet he didn’t continue eating his food. His attention was fully captured by Kurama. He was curious about her reaction to taste.

  


Kurama tried picking some rice with chopsticks. It was surprisingly easy; the rice was very sticky. Despite her hand being quite shaky, she managed to move it to her mouth, taking her very first bite of food. Although, the average customer would say that the taste of steamed rice is rather plain, to Kurama, who had never had a taste of human food, it was a meal of gods. Needless to say, she started munching it like there was no tomorrow.

  


Seeing as Kurama was completely taken by her newfound sense of taste, Tobirama decided to finally proceed with his food. Or so he wished to do, yet he was interrupted by a polite greeting.

  


“Good evening,” said the voice to his right.

  


Tobirama turned his head in the direction of the voice. An unusual looking person was standing beside the table, his golden snake eyes were fixed on Tobirama’s face. Tobirama didn’t care about this person’s looks as much as he cared about his clothes. For he was wearing a traditional Konoha’s flak jacket.

  



	7. Chapter 7

Do children need parents? What a silly question that is, huh? Of course, they do. Parents are responsible for both material and spiritual upbringing when it comes to children. The former means basic physiological needs like food, shelter and clothing, while the latter means providing a child with basic moral values and emotional support. So, with all that said it is rather hard to deny that a role of parents is quite an important one. Does that mean that a child can’t survive without a parent? No, absolutely not. There are plenty of examples of the contrary. One of such examples was named Orochimaru.

Orochimaru had been orphaned at the age of six. Up until that point his material needs had been fulfilled by his parents. Afterwards, an orphanage had taken care of him. One could argue that having parents and losing them is worse than never having them at all. That is up for a debate, nevertheless having been exposed to a sense of loss at such a young age, had given Orochimaru something that children of his age usually lack. An ambition, a true desire, which had manifested in a rather simple thought ‘I don’t want to feel that ever again.’

But wait a second, what about his psychological needs? Who’d taken care of that? We’ll get to that in a moment. Generally speaking, when children don’t get emotional support from parents, they seek it in their environment. To put it simply, their moral values are formed by their peers. However, little Orochimaru had been too rational for his own sake. After he’d experienced a sense of loss, he’d posed a very simple yet reasonable question to himself: “What do I do to not feel that?”. He’d come up with the simplest and most efficient solution to that problem: you cannot possibly lose something if you never have it in the first place. That’s why he’d decided to distance himself from his peers.

For quite some time this solution had worked well for him. He hadn’t experienced any kind of loss, but he also hadn’t experienced any kind of relationship whatsoever and by the time he’d graduated the Shinobi Academy he hadn’t had a single friend. He’d spent most of his time educating himself on various topics. Unsurprisingly his hard work had borne a fruit and he’d graduated top of his class. His dedication which had been caused by trauma, eventually had been mistaken for natural talent by Sarutobi Hiruzen.

When Orochimaru was first introduced to his team, he thought of them as ‘annoying’, ‘arrogant’ and ‘narrow-minded’. The annoying one went by the name Jirayia, and although Orochimaru hated his guts, he became the closest thing to a friend for the Snake Sanin. The arrogant one was called Tsunade, the girl was so full of herself that Orochimaru could barely tolerate her. Eventually he felt something different toward her. A feeling that is known as pity. For although she had a cloudless childhood, her youth was nothing short of emotional torment. Her clan? Extinct. Her brother? Mutilated. Her first love? Died on her hands. Suffice to say, that this series of events changed her outlook on life drastically.

That leaves us with the narrow-minded one, who was better known as the Third Hokage. Orochimaru’s two teammates had been used to calling that person ‘sensei’. However, Orochimaru hadn’t been able to call him that. Without doubt, Hiruzen had exceptional teaching skills, but being a good teacher doesn’t mean being a good mentor. Not to say that he was ill-advised or inexperienced. No, that’s not it. What made Sarutobi a horrible mentor to Orochimaru was his shallow philosophical paradigm and his complete inability to separate himself from his village. The man was only able to look at things through a prism of nationalism. It’s much later that Orochimaru speculated that there might have been an emotional trauma involved in the life of Sarutobi Hiruzen that had made him the way he was.

So, if Orochimaru didn’t get spiritual fulfillment from his peers, nor did he get it from his team captain, where did he get it from? To answer that question, we would have to visit a rather unpopular place in Konoha. A place that is filled with a grand amount of paperwork. You might have guessed it wrong, since it is not the Library. It’s the Archive.

It is well-known fact that shinobi have to form a written report, whether they succeeded or failed at their mission. After that report is read by a Hokage, it ends up in the Archive. But wait, what about reports on secret missions? Well, they end up in the Archive too, but with a slight or not-so-slight delay. That is to say that in five, ten or twenty years, they are made public, since the Archive is a public place, in fact, you don’t need any permit whatsoever to attend it. Be it by accident or a good fortune, during his childhood Orochimaru had somehow ended up attending that place almost every day.

At one point when he’d still been a student at Shinobi Academy, Orochimaru had been digging through a pile of old reports. His curious mind had reasoned that he would get much more useful knowledge from a real-life story than from a fictional one. Usually those reports were two, three, at most ten pages long. Imagine his surprise when he’d stumbled upon a document three hundred pages long. Needless to say, he’d been interested right away. As it turned out, it was not a report at all, but a draft of a book, a memoir to be precise, of none other than the Second Hokage Tobirama Senju.

In that book Tobirama went to great lengths to explain his worldview. Of course, being a child Orochimaru hadn’t been able to understand everything right away, after all the book tackled some fundamental problems of human society. However, as it usually goes, imitation precedes creation, hence Orochimaru subconsciously had started to incorporate bits and pieces of the book into his thinking.

How huge of an impact can one book have on a child? Well, to Orochimaru the impact had been of unimaginable scale. It’d shaped inner workings of his mind; it’d explained to him the beauty of the world and its secrets. Unsurprisingly Tobirama Senju had become an important figure in Orochimaru’s life. A mentor of sorts, an example to be followed. And so Orochimaru followed. Literally. He’d wanted to access every research that had been conducted by the Second Hokage during his life.

It is safe to say that Tobirama Senju had become a substitute for Orochimaru’s parents. And the Snake Sanin had taken it in a kind of twisted way. He’d thought that the Second Hokage was the only person who could actually understand him. Which is why when he’d gotten his hands on the Impure Reincarnation technique, the first thing he’d tried to do was to resurrect Tobirama. He’d failed. The technique just hadn’t worked. It had worked fine with every other shinobi, but not with Tobirama. At the time Orochimaru had assumed that the creator of technique had put some kind of a countermeasure to prevent himself from being summoned.

Right now, Orochimaru could see that he was completely wrong in that assumption, for Tobirama Senju was sitting right in front of him. When it comes to pushing one’s buttons, it is extremely easy to do so if you are familiar with one’s childhood. Because childhood is exactly the time when these ‘buttons’ are formed. In a way, Orochimaru’s childhood was centered around Tobirama, which is why Tobirama was pushing his buttons by merely being alive.

“Good evening,” Orochimaru could barely contain himself. “ _Calm down,”_ he thought. “ _It is probably a pretender, the best I could do is to gather why someone is masquerading as the Second Hokage at the border city of Water Country.”_ His scientific mind however was whispering, “ _Wouldn’t it explain why you couldn’t summon him?”_. And indeed, it would.

“A Konoha’s shinobi in a politically unstable country, huh?” Tobirama was swift to respond. “Is Konoha interested in an upcoming conflict?”

“No,” Orochimaru was caught off guard with that question and before he could stop himself, he mumbled, “it’s for personal research.”

“A personal research?” Tobirama grew exited, “To meet a fellow scientist, that’s a rarity these days. Please do take a sit. Tell me more about what it is you’re researching.”

That sparked Orochimaru’s interest, he thought that whoever this person in front of him was, he wouldn’t be able to hold a coherent conversation about scientific research. Therefore, Orochimaru would be able to reveal his true identity.

“My research,” Orochimaru took a sit across the table from the man, “concerns a particular Bloodline Limit. The said Limit is in possession of a clan, which goes by the name Kaguya. They—”

*cough* *cough*

Orochimaru snapped his attention to the person who interrupted him. It is only now that he noticed that there was one more person sitting beside the pretender. From the looks of it, that person was choking on whatever she was eating. “ _An Uzumaki?”_ thought Orochimaru. The girl looked like she was a pure-blooded Uzumaki.

“Take it easy, we’re not in a rush.” Tobirama gently hit Kurama on her back. “About Kaguya clan,” he looked back at Orochimaru, “you might want to finish your research by the end of this week.”

“And why is that?”

“I used that clan to test one of my inventions, a seal if I recall correctly.” Tobirama frowned, thinking about his old project. “The thing itself, is not of a destructive nature, however if my experiment succeeds—which is yet to be seen—the clan will be extinct by the end of this week.”

“Huh,” Orochimaru snorted, “you expect me to believe that you’re conducting research on my subject clan. Not only that, but at the same time as me. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Well,” Tobirama shrugged, “see for yourself.” With a puff of smoke, a journal appeared on the table in front of Orochimaru. It looked hefty.

Orochimaru opened it with an expectation to see some kind of gibberish that was probably aimed to distract him. What he was not expecting to see was a well-documented observation of the effects of a sealing technique. The technique itself was there too, from the first glance Orochimaru noted that the seal was designed to have some kind of psychological influence on a victim. There was also something else that caught Orochimaru’s attention, the style of writing. It was very familiar. Needless to say, he dove straight in. It was as if someone flipped a switch inside of him. And with that flip the outer world ceased to exist to him.

Meanwhile Kurama finally managed to stop her coughing.

“So, there is a Kurama clan in Konoha,” she was talking to Tobirama. “A Kaguya clan in Water Country… What’s next, a Hagoromo clan in Earth Country?”

“As far as I know Hagoromo clan is extinct by now,” said Tobirama. “But, when they were alive, I believe, they resided in the Fire Country.”

“That’s crazy!” Kurama exclaimed.

“What’s so crazy about that?” Tobirama raised an eyebrow.

“Ugh,” Kurama was shaking her head, holding it with both hands. “Nothing, nothing…"

Their discussion was interrupted by an explosion. A wall of the diner literally exploded. The explosion itself wasn’t of chemical or chakra nature. What caused an explosion was a cannon ball. It would seem that the town was being shot at from the harbor.

“I guess pirates are quite popular here,” said Tobirama. “That’s our cue to leave, let’s go.”

“Wait, what about…” Kurama pointed at Orochimaru. He was still sitting reading journal, as if nothing had happened.

“I think he’ll manage. Don’t worry about him.” Tobirama urged her toward the exit door. “So, you were saying the clan names are confusing…”


	8. Chapter 8

In all honesty Uchiha Shisui was quite nervous. It’s not every day that you’re called to speak with the clan head. Currently, sitting in front of Uchiha Fugaku, Shisui couldn’t help but wonder did he do something wrong? Suffice to say, he was fidgeting. And if you think about this situation carefully, it was only natural, for although he was renowned as genius, he was only 7 years old.

“I’ll keep it brief,” said Fugaku, “I invited you here to give a mission.”

A mission, huh? Shisui felt relief. If the purpose of him being here was a mission, then he didn’t do anything wrong. But what kind of mission required briefing from a clan head? For now, Shisui kept his questions to himself, meanwhile Fugaku continued talking.

“An hour from now, the ambassador from Kumo will arrive at the Northern Gates. That is when the first phase of mission will begin.” Fugaku’s voice was calm and steady. “The only thing you should know about that phase is that if it succeeds, your mission cancels. However, should it fail the second phase will start. That is when you come into play. Your objective is to travel from the Uchiha compound to the training ground forty-four.” Fugaku paused, giving Shisui a chance to ask questions.

“Am I correct to assume that I’ll be working as a bait?”

“Correct.” That question reassured Fugaku that he chose the right person for the mission. “It is likely that you’ll be attacked on your way to the training ground.”

“And the attacker will be Kumo affiliated, right?” Fugaku nodded. “In that case, what am I expected to do when I’ll be attacked?”

“Hopefully nothing,” said Fugaku. “Clearly, you will be tailed, should the attack be conducted, you will be protected. If you’re asking whether you can fight back, then yes you can. In fact,” Fugaku took out a three-bladed kunai, “take this. Do you know what it is?”

Shisui took the weapon, after a moment of turning it in his hands, he announced his verdict. “It’s a weirdly-looking kunai.”

“It works as a beacon to our Hokage. In case of unexpected emergency, fill it with chakra and throw it. That should summon him.”

Shisui took a second look at the weapon. Now he was extremely curious about that thing. How did it work? Was it the seal on the handle?

“Whether the first phase succeeds or fails, you’ll be notified. Until then, feel free to stay here or at your house.”

“I’ll need some supplies from my house, in case I’ll have to fight.”

“Then you are free to leave.”

Shisui stood and with a short bow he left the room. 

* * *

Do you think names are important? They certainly are during infiltration missions. Of course, there are a lot of nuances when one tries to disguise oneself as someone else. Choosing a name is merely one of them. One could say that people are conditioned their whole life to respond a certain way when their names are mentioned. A physical reaction is expected from a person whose name is called. This kind of reaction is extremely difficult to fake, since it is almost instantaneous.

Although some names convey meaning, it’s not the meaning that prompt a physical reaction, it’s the sound. Kakashi learned this simple, yet brilliant trick during his past infiltration missions. When choosing a name, choose the one that sounds roughly the same as your own.

When the door of the hotel opened, Kakashi was the first to greet the guests.

“Greetings, my name is Nanashi and I’ll be your personal servant for today.” Receiving a nod of acknowledgement from the leader of Kumo shinobi he continued. “Your apartment is ready, please follow me.”

Leading Kumo’s ambassadors to their room, Kakashi had a feeling of being watched. Surprisingly this feeling stemmed not only from the direction of Kumo shinobi, but from everywhere. Kakashi wasn’t worried about Kumo shinobi feeling the same way, since he knew that it was caused by his foreknowledge. He was well aware that each and every room they were passing had an ANBU operative and a Hyuga inside. The latter likely watching them intently, ready to signal if something looked suspicious.

“Nanashi.” The shinobi behind him called. “ _A test,_ ” thought Kakashi slightly turning his head. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.” Judging by their lack of reaction Kakashi passed the test on initial reaction.

“On our way here, we heard that some kind of celebration is planned for today. Do you know what it is?”

Kakashi had expected that question, after all he knew exactly what they’d heard since it was all part of the first phase of the mission.

“Um, well…” he pretended to hesitate. “I think you’ll be better off asking shinobi, but as far as I know those preparations are for that barbaric ritual.”

“Barbaric ritual?”

“Yes,” Kakashi nodded. “Uchiha and Hyuga are throwing their clan heirs into the forest full of dangerous predators.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean exactly that!” Kakashi intentionally raised his voice. “Children five years of age, are left there to survive. Also no one is allowed to not only intervene but even to oversee them. It’s madness!” Kakashi faltered. “Uh… Sorry, I shouldn’t have raised my voice.”

“Don’t worry it’s understandable, after all you’re so young yourself.” He sounded carefree. “Speaking of which, how come you’re allowed to work here while being so young?”

“Oh, that…” Kakashi sounded embarrassed. “My father is the owner of this hotel.” A believable ruse Kakashi was ready to feed them. Judging by a nod from one of them, they bought it. “We’re here.” He opened the door for them and let them in. “Don’t hesitate to call for me, should you need something.” With those words, he left.

Immediately after the door was shut in front of Kakashi, he felt that a sound barrier was raised on the other side. 

Inside of the room, the youngest of Kumo shinobi made his first mistake. And in the shinobi world your first mistake usually becomes your last. With a certain belief in the sound barrier, not knowing that several dozens of Hyuga were watching his lips move, he uttered one phrase. A phrase that decided his fate. “Do we take an Uchiha too?”

Kakashi managed to make five steps away from the room with Kumo shinobi, when the door of the said room exploded. The assault had started.

“ _I suppose the second phase cancels,”_ he thought while making his way to the hotel exit. He had to report to the Hokage.

* * *

It was slowly swinging forward and backward. Her eyes were tracking it with predatory concentration. She was ready to act at any given moment now.

Lunge.

As expected, she caught it. With one hand she caught… another hand. The one that belonged to Tobirama. Unsure of what to do next, she leveled her sight with Tobirama’s. Only to be met with a silent question in his eyes. She grew embarrassed and tried to pull away, she found out that she couldn’t. His grip tightened on her hand. He didn’t ask anything, he continued walking and she swiftly followed, only now they were connected. To put it simply, they were holding hands.

Tobirama was the first person to have accepted her in a long while. Although he was curious about a lot of things, he never pried and she was grateful for it. He was also extremely knowledgeable on the most diverse topics. Regardless of what question she’d ask, he would always answer in the most thorough way possible. There were, however, questions Kurama consciously avoided.

Who was this Tobirama person? Why did his chakra feel like Biju’s? Did he have family? Could he be older than she was? He certainly sounded like it. She couldn’t bring herself to ask that, because she thought it unfair. How could she ask personal questions, when she wasn’t willing to answer them herself? These thoughts made her feel uncomfortable. She decided that next time he’d ask her something personal, she would absolutely answer. And then she would ask him her questions. She nodded absentmindedly, as if agreeing with her plan.

The sound of thunder captured her attention. It started raining. She stopped to admire the sound of raindrops hitting leaves. Tobirama stopped too. Could it be that he liked it too?

“It should be here somewhere.” His voice was quiet, but she was able to hear it.

“What should be here?”

Tobirama was turning his head left and right, obviously searching for something. He was frowning. Kurama noticed that he did that a lot when concentrated on something. She was sure that he’d acknowledged her question, yet his mind currently was occupied with something else, preventing him from answering. She decided to wait. And her patience yielded results, for a minute passed and Tobirama’s voice joined the sound of rain.

“When I was younger,” he moved forward slowly, and Kurama followed, “me and my brother were traveling through this land.” 

“ _A brother…”_ thought Kurama.

“He was quite a rash person, always prone to doing things on a whim. At one point in the past, we had the need to stay for the night here in the forest and he decided that he didn’t want to sleep on the ground.” Tobirama stopped and raised his hand in front of him. Kurama felt that right now they were standing in front of the barrier. “That’s how he invented a technique that builds houses.” With a swipe of his hand, Tobirama cracked the barrier and moved forward pulling Kurama with him. “But _just_ a house was not enough for him, hence he started whining that he wanted a hot spring in the middle of it. That’s how I became an accomplice in that crime against ninjutsu.”

And indeed, there appeared a house in front of Kurama and they were moving toward it. Meanwhile Tobirama continued talking.

“It’s a simple design really. There are four rooms, that together form a rectangle with a hot spring in the middle of it. There’s a simple barrier over the house to prevent the rain from falling inside and—”

“Is it supposed to look like that?” Kurama pointed at the entrance shoji door. They were broken as if someone fell on them. Tobirama frowned.

“No… no it’s not.”

They made their way to the entrance door where they were met with a sight of a body, face down lying on the floor. The first noticeable thing about it was hair, it was quite long and of auburn color, spread out on the floor and stained with blood. There was blood all over the floor. The body obviously was the source of it. At this point Tobirama let go of Kurama’s hand. He kneeled near the body and took a closer look.

“She’s still breathing,” he said. With his voice the supposedly unconscious body sprang into action and tried to pierce Tobirama’s throat with a kunai, but he’d expected that. He grabbed the hand with a kunai by the wrist and pulled it to the side, with his other hand pushing against attacker’s shoulder. With a popping sound the attacker’s elbow joint slid out of place. She groaned and lost consciousness, this time for sure.

His attention snapped to Kurama, for a great deal of orange chakra was condensing around her. Her eyes fixed on an unconscious woman.

“Woah, easy there,” he waved his hands in an attempt to get her attention, surprisingly it worked. Seeing as Tobirama was in no immediate danger she calmed down.

Tobirama turned his gaze to the unconscious shinobi. “What do we do with you…? Hmm,” the question was addressed to seemingly no one, but Kurama decided to answer regardless.

“I say we kill her.”

“That is certainly an option,” he said thoughtfully, “albeit quite an effortless one.”


	9. Chapter 9

Orochimaru entered the eastern gates of Konoha. He was completely oblivious to his surroundings. His mind kept returning to the events of past week, the technique he had received by a sheer luck and a person who’d given him the said technique. Suffice to say, his mind was overloaded with all kinds of information. There were lots of things to be done and he was yet to choose the best course of action.

The Kaguya clan was dead. The technique obviously working. Its creator was nowhere to be found. After Orochimaru had digested that information, he’d made several conclusions. Tobirama Senju was alive, he was researching ways of fuinjutsu and judging by the amount of time that had passed since his supposed death, he didn’t plan on returning to Konoha. Why though? Orochimaru had a hypothesis, but that was not important right now. With Tobirama Senju alive, Orochimaru was sure in one thing. The way to immortality existed.

Over the last few years, Orochimaru had been working on his own immortality method. He’d managed to come up with the technique which he’d called Fushi Tensei. He’d finished the theoretical part of it a month ago, and was ready to try it in practice. Orochimaru didn’t like the technique, for although it granted an immortality, it had a parasitic nature. And to exist as a parasite, was something Orochimaru despised. However, he was perfectly aware that the lack of any kind of alternative would push him to accept it. Fortunately, with his mentor being alive, he was certain that the alternative was waiting to be discovered. He would start from the notes on Impure Reincarnation. He was sure that he would encounter a clue or two there. 

There was also a matter of the asset he’d retrieved from the Water country. This asset was half of his height, had a silvery gray hair and responded to a name Kimimaro. He was walking a little behind the Snake Sanin and the said Sanin was not sure what to do with him. The kid was supposed to be in the Rice country, but since Orochimaru had decided to stay in Konoha, that plan was useless now.

With his attention unfocused, it was not surprising that Orochimaru accidentally bumped into someone on his way. He was ready to lash out on whoever dared to interrupt his train of thought, but as soon as he realized who that was, his anger vanished. Before him stood a man in his late thirties, he was wearing Konoha’s standard flak jacket, his messy white hair was kept in some semblance of order by a headband.

“Jiraiya…” uttered Orochimaru. Jiraiya was saying something to Orochimaru, but the Snake Sanin wasn’t listening, he had finally settled on what he was going to do.

“Jiraiya,” Orochimaru spoke over Jiraiya. “I need your help.” A phrase that immediately silenced Jiraiya. As if to emphasize the meaning behind that phrase, a thunder roared just after Orochimaru voiced that phrase. That thunder sounded twice as loud to Jiraiya, for it was the first time that his friend requested something from him.

Orochimaru had a lot of work to do, hence he wasn’t waiting for Jiraiya to comprehend his words. He crouched and picked up the kid, he wanted to get things done as fast as possible.

“Whoa, wh… Wait!” Jiraiya exclaimed. “I was summoned to the Hokage tower—"

“Well, coincidentally,” Orochimaru interrupted him again, “that’s exactly where I’m going, so hurry up I don’t want to get soaked.” He moved swiftly in the direction of the Hokage tower and Jiraiya followed.

* * *

In the Hokage cabinet, Minato was retelling the events of last week to Sarutobi. Tsunade was also there sitting on the couch.

“…which is why it was decided to subdue them. The operation was a success, currently they are under the effects of sleep inducing genjutsu.” Minato paused. “I was thinking, maybe you’d have an advice…” he left that hanging.

“Certainly, you were quite cautious in my absence,” said Sarutobi thoughtfully. He was away from village for more than a week, paying a visit to the Daimio.

“Did you manage to get new information from Daimio?” asked Minato.

Before Sarutobi could answer, the window opened and Jiraiya showed up crouching on the windowsill.

“Yo!” he greeted everyone in the room. “Long time no—” a ruthless kick on his back interrupted his greeting. He fell clumsily on the floor. The windowsill was now occupied by Orochimaru who was holding a kid in his hands. Not for long though. He quickly left the said windowsill and moved to the couch, where Tsunade was sitting, making sure to step on Jiraiya on his way there.

“You could be a bit gentler next time,” groaned Jiraiya from the floor.

“You could be a bit out-of-my-way next time,” replied Orochimaru, leaving the kid on the couch. “It’s been a while.” Those words were directed to Tsunade, who nodded in reply.

“Don’t tell me that this kid, is our mysterious thief,” said Sarutobi.

“ _A thief?”_ thought Orochimaru. “ _Oh… right. I was sent to track the shinobi that stole the Kyuubi.”_ Orochimaru was quite good at improvisation, hence he started talking. “I tracked the enemy to the Water country, where I lost his trail.” Orochimaru was lying through his teeth, or at least he thought so. He wasn’t aware that, in fact, he was telling the objective truth. “The kid has nothing to do with it, except that he is from the said country.”

“Then why did you return?” asked Sarutobi.

“When I was there, I’ve encountered someone and they gave me something, which prompted me to come back.” Orochimaru was intentionally vague in his descriptions, he wanted to get the hang of the mood in the room, so he could lead the conversation to where he wanted to.

“Is this someone somehow connected to the Second Hokage?” asked Sarutobi.

Internally Orochimaru was surprised, however, he didn’t let that emotion show on his face. “What brought this on?” he was fishing for more information.

And so Hiruzen and Minato retold him everything that they had managed to gather about the Fox attack. They told him about the Thunder God technique and about their suspicions about the Impure Reincarnation.

“Hmm…” Orochimaru touched his chin with his index and thumb. “So, you think that someone, allegedly Kumo, had resurrected the Second and had made him steal the Fox.”

“Correct,” Minato wanted to continue, but stopped seeing that Orochimaru raised his hand.

“I’m almost certain that you’re wrong.” Orochimaru looked at Minato. “Before I tell you why, let me confirm something. Are you absolutely certain that the Thunder God technique couldn’t have been stolen?”

“Absolutely,” Minato nodded. “That is out of question.”

“Then why do you think that Edo Tensei could? I mean your version of the Thunder God technique might be protected in some way I’m not aware of, but the rawer version of the said technique is stored in the same scroll where Edo Tensei is. Hence the question, why do you think that Edo Tensei was stolen?” At that point Orochimaru wasn’t looking at Minato, his eyes were tracking Hiruzen’s face, and he saw exactly what he was searching for.

It was subtle, but for a moment Sarutobi had diverted his sight from Orochimaru. The old man had felt shame, he’d quickly hidden it, but it was too late. Orochimaru sensed weakness and he didn’t hesitate to strike.

“You thought it was me,” the statement was addressed to Sarutobi. “You thought it was me, who gave the technique to Kumo.” Orochimaru wasn’t asking a question, he was quite sure in his conclusions. “That’s why you sent me to track that phantom thief too,” he continued pressing. “You didn’t want to catch him, or you didn’t want to _just_ catch him, you wanted me out of village.”

Orochimaru thought that he would do the same had he been in the old man’s shoes. But of course, he didn’t say that out loud. He could read the emotional situation of the room. To him it was the golden opportunity to put a wall between him and Sarutobi, without causing much of a stir.

“You know,” said Orochimaru. “I thought that my opinion of you couldn’t fall any lower… Guess I was wrong.”

“Orochimaru, I—” Hiruzen tried to muster an excuse, but Orochimaru interrupted him.

“Let’s suppose you were correct and I did trade the said technique to Kumo. Let’s assume that they have his DNA,” he was talking about the Second Hokage. “Still, they wouldn’t be able to resurrect him.”

“Why?” asked Minato.

Orochimaru didn’t answer at first. He walked to the portrait of the Second Hokage, which was hanging on the wall. He was now facing everyone in the room with his back. He crossed his arms across his chest.

“When I first got my hands on that technique, whom do you think I tried to resurrect?” It was obvious, to everyone in the room that he was referring to the Second Hokage. That question made everyone in the room thoughtful.

Tsunade didn’t get to see much of her great-uncle, he died when she was still quite young, but she knew that he was responsible, not only for quite a few giant leaps of progress in Ninshu, but also for the educational system of the village. She reasoned that Orochimaru had probably known that as well, hence it was only natural for him to try to get a talk with her great-uncle.

Minato thought that Orochimaru’s actions, regarding the Second Hokage were quite logical. Who could tell you the most about a technique? Obviously, the creator. And Tobirama Senju was the creator of many techniques.

Kimimaro didn’t know what all these people were talking about, but he was ready to provide his savior with any kind of help he could.

Jiraiya thought a little deeper than everybody in the room. “ _Could it be that he was searching for emotional support from someone with the same mindset?”_ Jiraiya couldn’t know that, but he was totally spot on.

“ _But how did he get his DNA?”_ thought Sarutobi. However, he didn’t dare to voice that question, for he was still feeling a great deal of shame.

“How did it go?” asked Jiraiya. Everyone in the room was interested in the said question.

“I failed,” said Orochimaru. “The technique has some kind of a precaution, which prevents the summoning of the Second Hokage. It works on everyone else, but not on the Second.” Orochimaru was lying, he knew the true reason, but obviously he wasn’t going to reveal it.

The truth was, no one actually knew how Edo Tensei worked. It was extremely easy to use, but the internal mechanism of the technique was a complete mystery. Therefore, everyone in the room who had a shred of knowledge about the technique, thought that Orochimaru’s explanation had sounded quite logical.

“That is why I’m certain that your theory about the identity of the thief is flawed,” he shot a pointed look to Sarutobi, “by a wishful thinking.” He turned his sight to Minato. “On our way here, Jiraiya told me that there are some Kumo shinobi in Konoha. Why?”

“They were pretending to be ambassadors,” said Minato. “In reality, they wanted to steal Byakugan. They were captured, but as of right now, I have no idea how to handle the situation without it escalating into a major conflict.”

“I believe, I might have a solution that’s right up your alley,” with a puff of smoke a journal appeared in his hands. It was a copy of a journal he’d received in Water country; he gave it to Minato. “When I was at the Water country, I met a seal master and an Uzumaki.”

“A seal master Uzumaki, huh? What are the odds?” said Jiraiya thoughtfully.

“No,” said Orochimaru. “A seal master _and_ Uzumaki. Whether this Uzumaki is a seal master or not, I don’t know. I would appreciate if you let me finish, Jiraiya.”

“Uh… sorry.”

“He gave me that journal,” Orochimaru pointed to the journal in Minato’s hands. “It describes a very specific sealing technique, which might be the panacea for you Minato.” He frowned. “Unfortunately, we were separated by a pirate raid on the town and I couldn’t ask him anything, but I’ve managed to witness the devastating consequences of this technique. In fact, the presence of this child,” he pointed to Kimimaro, “is the direct result of said technique.”

“What do you mean?” asked Tsunade.

“His name is Kimimaro Kaguya,” continued Orochimaru, “the sole survivor of Kaguya clan.” With these words, Orochimaru wanted to draw a reaction from Tsunade and he succeeded.

Orochimaru knew that realistically, he wouldn’t have time for the child, therefore he wanted to delegate the diagnostics of kid’s body and Blood Limit to someone else. Of course, he needed someone adequate. And Tsunade was just the person for the job. In a way, Tsunade was a sole survivor of her clan too, which is why Orochimaru’s words prompted her her to empathize with the kid.

“He needs to be checked at the hospital,” said Orochimaru.

“I’ll help you with that.” Tsunade’s voice was firm. 

“In that case,” said Orochimaru. “I’d like you to look into his Blood Limit. It’s quite fascinating, I believe that it might help you push the boundaries of known medicine once more.” Orochimaru was now absolutely certain that Tsunade would do her absolute best in diagnosing the kid.

“Orochimaru,” Minato’s voice was excited. “What do you want for this technique?”

“ _Good,”_ thought Orochimaru, that was exactly the attitude he’d been aiming for from the beginning. “I want you, Jiraiya and, possibly, your wife to teach me fuinjutsu.”

“Wait,” said Jiraiya. “Why would you want us to teach you a fuinjutsu? I’ve seen myself that you are quite proficient in that art.”

“That is not exactly true,” Orochimaru disagreed. “I might have some degree of adequacy in that, but my fundamental knowledge of it is full of holes. I was never taught sealing. Everything I know about fuinjutsu, I’ve acquired by a method of educated guess. I’m not asking to teach me some secret Uzumaki techniques, I’m asking to teach me fundamentals.”

“If that technique works,” said Minato, “I’ll teach you and I’ll also ask my wife.”

Orochimaru was fully satisfied with the outcome of the conversation.

“The kid needs a guardian.” The words belonged to Tsunade.

Orochimaru had already thought that through. “Do you remember the adoption papers I’ve filled recently?” His question was pointed to Minato.

“Regarding the girl, that was orphaned by the Fox attack?”

“Yes,” he said. “I need them modified to include one more child.”

* * *

Kurama was anxiously biting her lip. She was sitting beside Tobirama, who was bandaging the unconscious kunoichi.

“You seem uncomfortable,” said Tobirama.

“Why are you helping her?” Kurama considered every stranger guilty, unless proven otherwise, consequently she was absolutely distrustful towards the unknown kunoichi.

“Why not?” asked Tobirama in a carefree tone.

That question made Kurama thoughtful. These past few days she’d learnt several important lessons. One of them being that she shouldn’t judge every single person based on her own past experiences. She should use the power of reason instead.

“She could be a burglar,” Kurama tried to be reasonable. That statement prompted a little smirk on Tobirama’s face.

“So, you think she tried sneaking into this house in an attempt to steal something, tripped over the threshold and almost bled to death by paper cuts from the shoji door?” Tobirama let out a little laugh.

“Then what do _you_ think happened, huh?” Her voice was grumpy. Tobirama decided to voice his thoughts.

“Most of the wounds are on her back, which means that it is likely that she was being chased here. This house is surrounded by a barrier. It’s not even a barrier really. It’s more of a stationary light genjutsu that diverts attention of whoever’s walking by. One of the ways to break through this genjutsu is to suppress it with pain. I believe that she was wounded long before she stumbled across this house, which is why she probably didn’t even notice that there was a genjutsu. She went straight in, probably in an attempt to find help. At this point she was probably extremely exhausted. She fell and broke the entrance shoji.

“Now, as you can see,” he gestured around him. “This house looks like no one lives here, which is exactly what she saw. That sight probably made her lose the last shred of hope. She was probably thinking that her pursuers were going to get her, but it is likely that they’d been affected by the genjutsu. Obviously, she didn’t know that. She was sure that she was going to die, and was ready to take at least one of them with her. But as the minutes passed her pursuers were nowhere to be seen. And that is when me and you entered the house and saw her body.

“I believe, that’s what happened.” He turned his gaze to Kurama silently waiting for objections.

“You can’t trust her.” Kurama could acknowledge that his hypothesis made perfect sense, but still she couldn’t give away her trust so easily.

“And why is that?” he asked. He was curious about her thought process.

“B-b-because…” she faltered, trying to think of a good reason, “she didn’t even say her name,” she blurted.

“You didn’t ask her,” Tobirama noted that names were quite important to Kurama.

“Of course, I didn’t,” she smirked in triumph, “she’s unconscious.”

“Nah, she’s been eavesdropping on us for quite a while now.” His words made Kurama snap her attention to the kunoichi.

The said kunoichi opened her eyes. She was still very weak, but decided to do the most reasonable thing based on what she had heard just now.

“It’s Mei,” she decided to introduce herself. “Mei Terumi.”


	10. Chapter 10

_…the greatest of problems could only be tackled by the greatest amounts of people. Which is why shinobi started to unite as clans, and later on as villages. However, what most ninjas nowadays seem to not realize is that a village, in its essence, is just a step. A step that carries us the same distance a clan once did. Can you imagine the final destination? A world where no border exists, where everyone unites to unravel the most mysterious of mysteries. The sheer thought of such possibility makes my mind boggle._

“That’s a very unique worldview,” said the voice from behind his shoulder. It prompted Orochimaru to snap the book shut and turn around. It’s been minutes since the meeting in the Hokage office. Tsunade had taken the kid to the hospital with the promise to drop him by Orochimaru’s house afterwards. The Snake Sanin was just about to leave the Hokage Tower.

“Jiraiya,” Orochimaru was holding the book he’d found long ago in the Archive. He was always rereading bits of it before getting into some kind of a big project. In a way it was his sacred ritual, hence why he grew a little irritated when Jiraiya interrupted him. “What do you want?”

“What do you mean?” Jiraiya looked surprised. “Weren’t you the one who asked me to teach you fuinjutsu?”

“I did,” said Orochimaru. “However, we are yet to see if the technique works.”

“That’s your deal with Minato, not me. I don’t care about that thing. What I do care about is that you’ve asked me for help. And I’m always ready to help.” He put his hand on Orochimaru’s shoulder. “After all, that’s what friends are for.”

Orochimaru was surprised, he was wouldn’t mind waiting, he was sure that the technique was working, but in the end, it was even better if he could start learning right away.

“You sound cheesy,” he brushed Jiraiya’s hand off his shoulder. He gestured for the Toad Sanin to follow.

“So,” started Jiraiya, “did _you_ write that?” He pointed to the book in Orochimaru’s hands.

“No,” Orochimaru knew what Jiraiya was about to ask.

“Can I have a look?”

“ _Just as expected,”_ thought Orochimaru a little bored. If Jiraiya were to ask that question when Orochimaru was a kid, the answer would have been ‘no’. Fortunately for Jiraiya, Orochimaru was an adult now, he had much more mature outlook on the world and although, the book was very significant to him, he was in favor of sharing knowledge. After all, that was one of the ideas proposed in the book.

Be it by his maturity or the fact that he was holding a copy instead of the original, he stretched his hand with a book in the direction of Jiraiya.

“Sure,” he said.

Jiraiya was ready to skim through first few pages, but stopped on the very first one. His face froze in surprised expression.

“Is that genuine?” he asked.

“If you’re asking about the author,” said Orochimaru, “then yes, it is.”

“But I’ve never heard of Tobirama Senju ever publishing a book,” said Jiraiya. “Surely, had it been published, it would get at least some amount of recognition.”

“You’re absolutely correct,” Orochimaru nodded. “It was never published in the first place.”

“Where did you find it, then?” Jiraiya narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Was it a restriction section of some super-secret place?”

“Hardly,” said Orochimaru. “It was inside the most open place in the entire village.”

“Hm…” Jiraiya hummed thoughtfully. “Hot springs?”

Orochimaru closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, slightly annoyed. “The Archive, Jiraiya, it was the Archive. Also,” he hesitated, thinking whether he should say what he was thinking. “The book is important to me.” Orochimaru didn’t know why he’d said that, or rather he refused to acknowledge the reason. He didn’t want to admit that Jiraiya’s word about friends had gotten to him, if only a little bit.

“Well, in that case,” said Jiraiya. “I’ll read it today and return it to you tomorrow.”

“Take your time, don’t worry about that,” Orochimaru tried to sound dismissive and Jiraiya saw right through that.

“ _That’s new,”_ thought Jiraiya. He’d never seen his friend act like that. “ _Just what happened to you in the Water country?”_ although he wanted to ask that, he decided that it’s better to not do that. He took a closer look at the book in his hands. “ _Maybe I’ll find the answer here.”_

* * *

Mei Terumi was an awfully unreliable narrator. Not to say that she was excessively lying, or lying at all. In fact, if she didn’t lie about her name—which she didn’t—she was absolutely truthful. The point of the matter was, however, that she didn’t say anything at all after she’d introduced herself, she blacked out shortly after.

“Hmm… well, now we know.” Tobirama addressed this phrase to Kurama.

“What?”

“Her name,” said Tobirama. “We now know her name.”

“Um,” she nodded hesitantly.

“Come with me,” said Tobirama as he stood up and held his hand. Instinctively she took it and followed him. Their journey was very short, literally three steps away from Mei’s unconscious body. “Remember I told you that there’s a hot spring here?” She nodded.

Tobirama proceeded to open the door to the inside area, that the house was surrounding. The first thing that captured Kurama’s attention was not the steamy hot spring that was so neatly organized, but the roof, or more specifically the thing that was in its place. It was still raining, but the rain couldn’t reach the inner area. Instead the raindrops were hitting the invisible barrier at the top, and were rolling off to the outer area of the roof, creating an illusion of flowing water dome over the house. It looked enchanting.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Tobirama’s voice pulled her from her marvel.

“It is,” she agreed.

“Would you like to try it?” he gestured towards the hot spring.

“Aren’t you supposed to use it, while being naked?” she wondered.

“That is correct,” said Tobirama. “I can go after you’re finished, if you’re shy.”

“Hmph, I am the greatest of Biju,” she said proudly. “Being of such an immense magnitude simply cannot feel shy.” She was shy.

“Okay then,” said Tobirama.

In an attempt to reinforce her blatant lie, she started stripping off her clothes, only to be stopped by Tobirama’s hand. She gave him a questioning look, and saw that in his other hand he was holding a towel.

“Thanks,” she took the towel.

“Of course,” he turned around and started stripping off his clothes. He summoned another towel, this time for himself. He heard the splashing sound behind him, signaling that Kurama was already in the water. He folded his clothes neatly and turned around.

Kurama was fully submerged in the hot spring, only the back of her head was visible to him. Her cloak was carelessly left on the ground. He took it, folded it neatly and left it beside his own clothes. Something, however, ticked him off. He frowned. Slowly, he made his way to the hot spring and submerged his body beside Kurama’s.

“Can I ask you a question?” he asked, his eyes closed.

“Sure,” her voice sounded surprised.

“I couldn’t help but notice that your yukata is nowhere to be seen. Where is it?”

“Um… w-w-well…” Kurama flushed, not that Tobirama could see it, his eyes were still closed. “It wasn’t real.”

Hearing that Kurama wasn’t going to elaborate, he asked: “Was it an illusion?”

“No,” said Kurama. “It was my chakra.”

“Oh,” said Tobirama, realizing that she was essentially naked when they first met. “Is it hard to make your chakra look like clothes?”

“Very,” she said. “It requires tremendous amount of concentration.”

“I do have some amount of clothes, that will suit you,” said Tobirama thoughtfully. “But we should probably go shopping for clothes sometime in the future.”

“Thank you,” Kurama was very grateful.

“We are yet to do that. You shouldn’t thank me beforehand.”

“No,” said Kurama. “I mean for everything you’re doing for me.”

“It’s only natural,” said Tobirama. “I said that I was going to teach you. That entails a certain amount of responsibility.”

“Others wouldn’t think that way,” Kurama didn’t elaborate on who she’d meant by ‘others’. Tobirama assumed that she’d meant humanity.

“Then it’s a good thing that I’m not part of others.”

A comfortable silence descended on the hot spring. The sound of raindrops hitting the invisible dome was the only audible sound. It was calming. Several minutes passed and Tobirama was the one to break the silence once again.

“Can I ask you another question?” his eyes were still closed.

“You don’t have to ask for a permission every time. Just ask.”

“If your method of forming clothes is this hard, why not just use an illusion?”

“That’s because I can’t,” she sounded embarrassed. Although, she did that a lot lately, generally she didn’t like admitting her helplessness.

“What about ninjutsu?” he asked.

“I can mimic some of them,” she said. “But on totally different principles.”

“I see,” he said pensively. “That leaves us with fuinjutsu. Have you ever tried that?”

“No,” she shuddered. “It’s ugly.”

“Perhaps, from the perspective of the victim,” he agreed, “but would you consider learning it from me?”

“Why?”

“Because, as far as I know, sealing is the only effective tool against Biju.” There was also Sharingan, Tobirama didn’t know that and Kurama didn’t point that out. “Which means that should you be knowledgeable in that field it’ll be less effective.” He paused, contemplating on something. “Actually, if you put considerable effort into it, I believe that in five years, there won’t be a seal capable of holding you. How does that sound?”

“It sounds too good to be true.” Throughout her whole life, fuinjutsu was there to only cause her pain and suffering, so it was understandable that she was hesitant about studying it.

“I think that you should at least give it a try,” insisted Tobirama. “I’m quite sure that you’ll come to like it eventually.”

Silence engulfed the hot spring once again. This time it was contemplative silence. It didn’t last for long, and this time Kurama was the one to break it.

“Okay,” she muttered. She glanced at Tobirama and saw that he acknowledged her answer with a slight nod of his head.

There was something else Kurama wanted, something she couldn’t quite put into words. She knew, however, that this something involved Tobirama. She didn’t want to ask about it, she wanted to act upon it. She shifted closer to him. Tentatively, she reached for his hand under water. As she touched it, he reached in response. They were now holding hands under water, their fingers intertwined. Hesitantly she rested her head on his shoulder, he didn’t seem to mind. Now Kurama felt that unknown feeling satisfied, she wanted this moment to last as long as possible. She closed her eyes, entering a meditative state, but she didn’t fall asleep, no.

Biju can’t fall asleep.


	11. Chapter 11

Mei was woken up by a muffled voice. She tried recalling the events of past days. It was surprisingly easy to do; they were fresh in her memory. Her body was tightly bandaged. She tried to get up, her body responded with dull pain from her back. The pain was quite tolerable. Slowly she walked in the direction of the voice. With each step it was getting louder and louder, until finally she was able to recognize that it was, in fact, not one but two voices. And one of them was exceedingly louder than the other.

“…stupid, stupid, stupid…”, she heard the louder voice. It definitely sounded feminine. The thought of eavesdropping came to her mind, only to be immediately followed by the memory of whitehaired man with crimson eyes.

“ _He is probably the quieter one,”_ she thought and decided to enter.

The shoji moved without a sound. The room she’d entered, had two people inside of it. The redheaded woman was sitting on the floor, she was focused on a piece of paper in her hands. In front of her was the whitehaired man, who immediately noticed Mei, but didn’t say a word to her. The same couldn’t be said about the woman, for not only did she not noticed the new visitor, but she was also quite audible in her grumping.

“Grrr!” She crumpled a piece of paper in her hands and tossed it to the side. Mei noticed that the whole room was littered with the same crumpled paper. Although it looked messy, Mei couldn’t help but admire the girl’s persistence in whatever she was trying to accomplish.

“Stop,” said the man. Mei couldn’t see, but she assumed that the man probably touched the girl’s hand. She moved a little closer and took a seat quite a distance away from them, but just enough to see what was in front of the girl. What she saw there, was… a calligraphy set?

“Let’s try something else,” he continued. “Calligraphy is generally accepted as a starting point, in other words, it’s a common practice. However, _you_ ,” he emphasized, “are anything but common.”

To Mei, who couldn’t comprehend the whole meaning of the phrase, it sounded as a cheap compliment. She could see that the girl was infatuated with the man. In fact, Mei could have sworn that the girl was still completely oblivious to Mei’s presence. Meanwhile, the man continued talking.

“What I’m about to show you, is a little harder than the traditional style,” he said. “But I do believe that it might be just the right starting point for you.” He picked up a piece of paper and held it in front of the girl. Mei was able to see it too.

“ _A seal?”_ thought Mei. She immediately recognized the traditional Uzumaki seal. It was extremely common among shinobi, mainly used for carrying supplies. With that recognition came realization: the girl was learning fuinjutsu. In that case, Mei could fully understand the girl’s frustration about calligraphy. If you wanted to be good at fuinjutsu, you would have to learn calligraphy, there was no workaround. Which was why the words of the man was of great interest to Mei. What was the alternative?

“Every seal,” he said, “consists of three major components. They are medium, pathway and trigger. For example, look at this seal.” He gestured to the seal he was holding in front of the girl. “In this particular case, the medium is represented by the paper, the pathway by the ink. Can you guess what represents the trigger?”

“ _Chakra?”_ thought Mei.

“Chakra?” asked the girl.

“Correct,” he said. “The trigger is chakra.” The theoretical knowledge behind fuinjutsu was of an immense value. Hence Mei was surprised as to why he was giving it away for free.

“The three components are mandatory, that’s a common knowledge,” he said.

  
“ _Not really,”_ thought Mei. She remembered how she was taught fuinjutsu at the academy. They were given a working seal and not a word of theory. They needed to memorize the pattern of the seal and try to redraw it. That was basically it. Mei was rather sure, that no one knew how these things worked. Even the instructors at the academy.

“What is not a common knowledge, is that two out of three can be easily substituted and one of those two is always present.”

Mei frowned, so did the girl, neither of them had understood the last statement.

“Let me demonstrate.” While holding the paper seal in his left hand, he held his right hand, palm facing upwards. 

What happened next, rendered Mei speechless. Above his right hand a swirl of chakra appeared. Slowly, it started to take a form… a form of fuinjutsu symbols.

“ _That’s impossible,”_ thought Mei.

“What do you think I’m trying to do?” the man continued talking to the girl, completely ignoring Mei’s astonishment.

“You’re trying to replicate a seal in your left hand with chakra,” said the girl.

“Correct,” he said. “In my right hand I’m holding the very same seal. We’ve already established that three components are mandatory in every seal. Knowing what they are represented by here,” he moved his left hand, “can you guess their semblances here?” he moved his right hand.

“The pathway is represented by chakra, right?” asked Kurama.

“Good,” said Tobirama. “What else do you see?”

“Hmm…” she was fully concentrated on the seal in his right hand. “Could the medium be air?”

“It could,” he said. “But I’m not using air here. Try again.”

She frowned, there wasn’t much else to be used as invisible medium if not air.

“ _If the rule about mandatory components is absolutely correct and air is not the medium, then that leaves us with…”_

“…space?” she said doubtfully, almost as if asking herself.

“Good job,” he smiled. “You’ve figured it out.”

“ _No way,”_ thought Mei. Fortunately for her, Tobirama was swift to elaborate.

“Space is perfectly viable medium. There is, however, one thing to be noted when working with space. You can tear it, punch it through or even fold it, but there’s virtually no way—that I know of—to move it. It might sound confusing, but let me demonstrate.”

He let go of the seal in his left hand and with a puff of smoke, a kunai appeared in his left hand. He held it over the seal in his right hand. The pattern of the seal slightly changed, and just like that the kunai was gone.

“Where do you think it is now?” he asked.

“It’s here,” she said confidently, pointing to the space where the seal was a moment ago. “I can feel it.”

And indeed, if one was proficient enough in senjutsu, one would be able to feel the objects sealed in space. Tobirama was aware of that, hence he was not surprised by Kurama’s statement.

“Good,” he said. “Now I want you to unseal it.”

“Wait,” said Kurama. “What about the last one?”

“The last one?”

“The trigger,” she said.

“What about it?”

Kurama stopped herself from asking the obvious question. Surprised, she realized that she had enough information to answer it herself.

“You said that two out of three components can be substituted,” she started talking. “You swapped the medium and pathway. Does that mean that the trigger is always represented by chakra?”

“You’re doing great,” he smiled again. “That is absolutely correct. The trigger is always represented by chakra. Obviously, your next question should be something like: ‘Then how is this possible to make pathways out of the same chakra? Wouldn’t it make the seal activate immediately?’. The answer is ‘yes’. It would. That is why I was not completing the pattern of the seal until the moment I sealed the kunai. There’s a bit more to it and we will get to it later. Right now, you have enough information to unseal the kunai and to replicate the technique.” He gestured to the space with sealed kunai.

Kurama glanced one last time on the paper seal. She was trying to replicate it with ink for hours, but to no avail. The only thing she’d gotten from it, was that she’d memorized it. She could easily replicate it with her chakra.

Mei was thinking uneasy thoughts, was she about to be killed? Such extensive knowledge about fuinjutsu would definitely be regarded as forbitten in her village. At the same time, she couldn’t quite believe her eyes, seeing as this man created a seal out of nothing else but sheer chakra. She was sure that nothing would be able to impress her anymore.

As if hearing her thoughts, the girl stretched her hand to the place where the kunai was supposedly sealed. Slowly, a swirl of chakra appeared above her hand and started forming the familiar symbols. Everything looked the same when compared to the previous display, except for color. While man’s chakra was white with bluish outline, hers was of color orange, with red outline.

With a popping sound a kunai appeared, seemingly out of thin air.

“ _Did she do it from the first try?”_ she thought. “ _It can’t be that easy.”_ She closed her eyes and concentrated. She wanted to replicate the sealing method, that she’d just seen. Before any visible sign of her chakra could appear, her concentration was broken by crumpled paper, tossed right into her face. She opened her eyes; the man was watching her.

“You’ll harm yourself if you continue,” he said. His words triggered something Mei hadn’t felt for a long time. The feeling of childish grudge.

Before she could stop herself, she blurted, “b-b-but, she did it from the first try!” She pointed at Kurama. Tobirama was about to say something, but Kurama beat him to it.

“Of course, I did,” she said. “That’s because I’m special and you’re not.” That explanation—of sorts—sounded completely logical to Kurama. To Tobirama, who knew the context, it sounded quite logical too. But to Mei, who was completely oblivious to the most vital part of information, it sounded rather offensive. It just added to her feeling of childish grudge.

“Not special!” she raised her voice. “I’ll have you know I possess not one, but two Bloodline Limits!” She was in the heat of the moment. “How’s that for ‘not special’, huh?”

Kurama had seen lots of shinobi throughout her life. The truth was, that when first humans had acquired the ability to control chakra, they had been capable of wielding dozens of Bloodline Limits. So, someone who could wield only two seemed quite dim to her. Needless to say, she reacted accordingly.

“Meh, I’ve seen better,” said Kurama. Tobirama let out a laugh, but tried to disguise it as a cough. Mei was taken aback by that reaction. All twenty years of her life, she was treated as someone very unique. And now seeing her special status brushed off so casually, she could feel fury rising deep inside her.

“Let me rephrase that,” the man took the initiative. “Her explanation,” he nodded towards the girl, “shouldn’t offend you. You see, this method of sealing is not about Bloodline Limits, it’s about inhumane, heh,” the double meaning amused him, “control over chakra. And while I’m sure my pupil here, is capable of such feat, I’m more than sure that you’re not. In fact, it’s likely that even some Kage level shinobi wouldn’t be able to replicate this method.”

Hearing his last phrase, Mei calmed down. That certainly put things in perspective. However, it raised other questions. Who was this girl, that wasn’t capable of drawing simplest seal, yet capable of forming it from chakra? And who was this man, who was effortlessly showing Kage level chakra control?

“Why don’t you seat a little closer and tell us how you ended up here?” the man continued talking. That suggestion seemed reasonable to Mei. She moved closer to other inhabitants of the room.

“I don’t know if you remember that, but you’ve told us your name. It’s Mei Terumi, isn’t it?” Mei nodded. “My name is Tobirama, I am the owner of this place.” Seeing as he wasn’t going to introduce his student, she interrupted him.

“What’s your name?” she asked the redheaded girl.

“Pff, why would I tell you.” It was official, Mei hated that girl.

“She’ll introduce herself should she wish so.” The man didn’t seem bothered by girl’s attitude towards Mei. “Now, I would like to hear your story.” It was subtle, but something changed in his tone. It felt pressing. Mei didn’t want to try his patience. And so, she started talking.


	12. Chapter 12

With Orochimaru leaving the room, there were only Minato, Sarutobi and Jiraiya left. 

“So, the new information from Daimio…” Minato prompted Sarutobi to continue.

“Right,” said Hiruzen. “Surprisingly, a person named Marotabi Jusen does, in fact, exist. Not only does he exist, but he is also an important semi-political figure.”

“Semi-political?” asked Minato.

“He’s an economist. Or rather an economic advisor for our Daimio.”

“Did you bring up the Daimio seal?” seeing as Hiruzen nodded Minato continued. “Then maybe he was lying, in an attempt to save his face?”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Hiruzen. “He was firm on not giving me any kind of information about this ‘economist’, which is why I went and asked his bodyguards. They were able to confirm that this person is very influential. They are, actually, forbitten to talk much him.”

“And yet they told you.”

“Well, I’m somewhat significant figure in shinobi world too, heh.” Hiruzen smirked. “Still, they didn’t tell much. They described him as a quite intimidating figure, yet the most interesting part was his appearance.” He paused.

“What’s so interesting about that?” asked Minato.

“His hair,” Sarutobi looked Minato straight in the eyes, “crimson red.”

Minato remembered Orochimaru’s words. “ _I met a seal master and an Uzumaki.”_

“Jiraiya,” said Minato. “I need everything you can find on this ‘economist’. Also, would you mind asking Orochimaru about this Uzumaki he’d met in Water country.”

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” seeing Minato’s confusion, he elaborated. “You will be teaching him sealing. Looks to me like a great opportunity to get to know each other better.”

Minato noted Jiraiya’s confidence in Orochimaru’s technique. “Very well then, I’ll do it myself.”

“About the economist,” said Jiraiya. “I’ll look into it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a friend to catch up with.”

* * *

“ _That was a week ago,”_ thought Minato. For the first time in a long while Minato was sitting on the couch at home. Yet, even now his mind was busy.

The seal that Orochimaru had given to him was successfully applied on every Kumo shinobi. Currently, they were being transported to the border with the Hotsprings country. Minato knew that it would be months, perhaps years, before those seals bring any kind of result. He’d decided that he would teach Orochimaru regardless. His wife played important role in that decision. Well… she had, in fact, made this decision for him.

After he’d told her about mysterious Uzumaki in the Water country, she’d started bombarding him with questions. And when he said that he didn’t know anything, she asked who knew. And then he told her everything about the deal with Orochimaru.

Obviously, Kushina couldn’t care less about the deal, she would gladly teach fuinjutsu. She loved it. The only thing she loved more than fuinjutsu was her family. And Uzumaki were part of the family. So, it was not surprising that the day Minato mentioned that Orochimaru might know more, she made him invite the Snake Sanin to their house. And today was the day Orochimaru was supposed to visit.

A knock at the door snapped Minato out of his thoughts. He stood up, but before he could make a single step towards the door, an excited scarlet flash dashed before his eyes. Of course, it was Kushina.

“Right,” he said and fell back on couch.

* * *

“I feel disturbingly immature.”

“I’ve established that a long time ago.”

Jiraiya and Orochimaru were on their way to Kushina’s house. Minato wasn’t that familiar with Orochimaru, which is why he asked Jiraiya for help, hence the current situation.

“Oh, come on,” whined Jiraiya, “play along!”

“Right,” Orochimaru sighed. “Why do you feel disturbingly immature?”

“Because of this,” he handed the book Orochimaru gave him earlier this week.

“Oh, it’s all right,” Orochimaru took the book. “I’ve felt exactly the same.”

“Really?” asked Jiraiya hopefully.

“Yeah, I mean, I _was_ ten after all.”

“Oh, fuck off,” he grunted.

Orochimaru gave an audible laugh. Despite his words, Jiraiya smiled himself. Orochimaru had changed after his trip to Water country. The more Jiraiya spoke to him, the more he was able to see that his friend was behaving as if some heavy burden was lifted from his shoulders. Clearly, he’d changed for the better and Jiraiya was all for that.

“But seriously,” said Jiraiya. “It made me reconsider my approach to my dream.”

“Oh, is it still ‘world peace’?” Jiraiya nodded. Orochimaru fell silent. For several moments silence prevailed.

“What?” asked Jiraiya. “You won’t even trash me for that stupid dream of mine?”

“I’ve never thought about your dream as stupid.” Orochimaru shrugged.

“Really?”

“Your approach, however, has always been stupid.” Before Jiraiya could interrupt him, he continued. “I mean, you can’t just tell people to stop fighting in hopes that they would listen to you. Or train some kind of messiah, hoping that they would listen to him.”

“Then how would you go about achieving world peace?”

“I would start from the economic sector,” Orochimaru was swift to respond.

“You seem to have given it some thought.”

“Of course, after all it is likely that that would be my objective,” he paused, “eventually.”

Jiraiya was surprised with that statement.

“Why economy?” he asked.

“Well,” said Orochimaru. “You might be familiar with an idea that war is good for economy.” Jiraiya nodded recalling that he had, in fact, heard that statement earlier. “Generally, this statement is utterly false, war usually diverts resources from productive uses. However,” Orochimaru lifted his index finger, “that is not the case with ‘total wars’. And by ‘total war’ I mean war where a country fully commits itself to that particular war. That type of war creates a situation where everyone is working towards a common goal, therefore able to find a job. Which in turn leads to booming economy.

Now, knowing all that, the problem with the world peace boils down to a simple plan. Create a situation where the economy of every country is flourishing, so that even total war wouldn’t bring any positive value. And there you have it: world peace.”

“That doesn’t sound simple at all,” said Jiraiya. “I mean, to create this flourishing economy in only one country, is a matter of decades if not centuries.”

“Exactly,” said Orochimaru.

“What do you mean?”

“Haven’t you just noticed? You’ve used an actual measure now. Not some abstract idea of world peace, but an actual measure of time. What I described just now, was quite a simple model, yet I was able to get you to think in tangible terms. My idea of world peace might require a lot of time and effort, yet both time and effort can be measured. While your abstract dream is just that, an abstract. I concur, you are doing something to achieve your dream, yet you cannot measure this ‘something’, therefore cannot predict whether you’ll succeed or not. Which leaves you with this uncertain idea of ‘belief’. You have to believe that you’ll succeed, and that is exactly what I consider stupid.”

Orochimaru stopped and knocked on the door. They were at their destination.

“Wow,” Jiraiya was stunned with Orochimaru’s answer.

“Wow, indeed… I’m glad that you were able to realize that your approach was rather unimpressive.” He looked at the book in his hand. “Sometimes, you’re exactly one book away from epiphany.”

Before Jiraiya could say anything, the door swung open and a crimson creature snatched Orochimaru inside.

Jiraiya was left alone. Seeing as the door was left opened, he proceeded to enter the house.

* * *

“I see,” said Tobirama. “So, Yagura started his little crusade. Honestly, I expected it a little later. Hmm… something forced him to start it sooner. And you were on a mission when it happened.”

Tobirama wasn’t asking, he was stating his thought process. Mei was patiently waiting for his verdict. It didn’t take him long to think it through.

“Seems…” he paused, “probable.”

Mei didn’t show any outward reaction, but inwardly she sighed with relief. The man, Tobirama, although was polite, felt weirdly intimidating.

“See,” Tobirama was referring to Kurama. “I’ve told you she wasn’t a burglar.”

“She might be lying.”

“Of course, of course.”

Mei didn’t like the girl. But maybe she was too biased, maybe she should try and make an effort to understand the girl. Maybe, she should make amends, before their relationship would be completely broken. That was her thought process.

“Listen,” said Mei, in an attempt to get girl’s attention. “I’m sorry—"

“You stink,” obviously, Kurama wasn’t aware of Mei’s thought process. And, frankly, she didn’t care. What she did care about was her sensitive nose.

That simple phrase, sparked Mei’s anger. And despite, trying to keep her cool, she blew up.

“Well, I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to take a bath while being chased or while being unconscious,” her voice was becoming gradually louder and louder, “and in case you haven’t noticed, we’re currently in the middle of nowhere, which—!”

“Ugh, you’re loud too,” Kurama also cared about her sensitive ears. “Just go and wash yourself already, there’s a hot spring behind that door.” Kurama pointed to her right.

“It’s true,” said Tobirama. “There’s a hot spring behind that door. Here,” he unsealed yet another towel. Wordlessly, Mei took the towel and left the room.

“I don’t like her.”

“I can see that,” said Tobirama. “Yet, she’s handling it quite well, don’t you think?”

Reluctantly Kurama nodded. After she’d understood the gist of situation, she tried to imagine herself in Mei’s place. And if she was being honest with herself, the situation would have been much uglier.

“Why was she chased?”

“She’s told you, albeit not on purpose. She possesses two Bloodline Limits.”

“Isn’t it good? Aren’t shinobi more valued if they possess Bloodline Limit?”

“Generally, yes, but the situation is a little more complicated than that,” said Tobirama. “I should probably explain to you how politics work, but that’s one long and boring lesson. If I were to simplify… recently, the current Mizukage, Yagura decided that those who possess Bloodline Limit have to be eradicated. And everyone agreed, obviously except for those who possess Bloodline Limit which was the minority.”

“But that’s just stupid.”

“It is, and had this situation occurred in any other hidden village, the ruler would have been substituted for someone more civil. However, the situation Kiri is rather unique. It is the only village where Kage holds supreme autocratic authority. Which means that, basically, his word is law there.”

“But why would he want to destroy his own people?”

“That is a question I cannot answer. I can only speculate,” said Tobirama thoughtfully. “In modern world, the order to kill Bloodline users would require generations of nurtured hatred. In Kiri, however, with their archaic form of government it requires nothing but a word of a single person, but even then… no one would ever accept such a self-hindering law. Therefore, Yagura is either lacking common sense or he is influenced by some external force. That’s my opinion on current situation in Water country.”

Kurama nodded, trying to wrap her head around new information.

“Don’t think about that too hard,” said Tobirama, “after all it doesn’t really matter to us. At least not now. Why don’t you try practicing that seal you’ve just learned? Fuinjutsu is all about creativity, try sealing multiple objects simultaneously.”

Kurama realized that she wanted to do that even before Tobirama suggested that. It was fun, she found herself enjoying it.

“ _It’s certainly more fun than talking about countrywide genocide,_ ” she thought.


	13. Chapter 13

Orochimaru found himself sitting behind the kitchen table, staring at the steaming cup of tea. There were also cookies on the plate beside the cup. He moved his gaze higher and saw Kushina sitting across the table, staring back at him… was she expecting something?

Hesitantly, he picked a cookie and took a little bite. They were chocolate cookies. It was at that moment that Kushina chose to speak.

“Tell me everything,” she blurted.

“What?” Orochimaru was confused and one could hardly blame him. Kushina’s statement seemed rather devoid of context. Fortunately, Minato was quick to intervene.

“She wants to know more about that Uzumaki, you’ve encountered in the Water country,” he moved closer and sat on the chair beside Orochimaru, “would you mind telling us more about that?”

“I see.” That clarified Kushina’s statement, but Orochimaru was curious. “Why are you so eager to know more?” He addressed that question to Kushina.

“Because they’re family.”

“Family?”

“Yes, family,” Kushina reaffirmed. “We Uzumaki had always had a great sense of community, to a point where everyone considered each other a family. I was very much against leaving the clan and coming to Konoha. Ever since I was separated from my clan, I’ve had this feeling of longing… you know?”

“I don’t,” seeing her confusion he elaborated. “My whole conscious life I’ve had a very opposite feeling to that what you’re describing. I’ve felt as if I don’t belong, so this ‘sense of community’ is quite alien to me.” He took another bite of chocolate cookie.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” said Orochimaru. “You’re not the first person that tells me about this mysterious feeling. I actually believe that I do miss out on this one.” He sipped his tea. “But let’s not talk about things I miss out on. You wanted to know more about that Uzumaki, sadly I don’t really know what to tell you. I mean, I’ve never even spoken to her.”

“Her?”

“Yes, her.” Orochimaru hummed thoughtfully, thinking what else he could say. Obviously, he didn’t want to bring up the other person from that encounter. A sudden idea, prompted him to ask a question. “You were jinchuriki of the Kyuubi, correct?”

“Uh,” an off-topic question caught her off guard. “I was.”

“Which means that you know how to enter your inner world, correct?”

Hesitantly, Kushina nodded, she still didn’t know where Orochimaru was going with that.

“I might not be able to tell you more about that Uzumaki, but I can at least show you how she looked like.”

“You mean… enter _your_ inner world… and see the memory?” she asked hesitantly. Seeing as Orochimaru nodded, she continued. “Wouldn’t we need a Yamanaka for that?”

“Generally, yes,” he confirmed. “However, I believe I have a decent grasp on my mind to show a single memory.”

Minato wanted to intervene, because he knew that it was dangerous to meddle with mind techniques without overseeing from a professional. After all, there was a reason why their village had a clan dedicated solely to that kind of techniques. As he was about to say something, Kushina gave him a stern look. And just like that the Yellow Flash of Konoha lost his spark of confidence and kept his opinion to himself.

“How do we do that?” asked Kushina.

“Take my hand and close your eyes,” he stretched his hand across the table, “it won’t take much time.”

Kushina did as instructed. Usually, when she had the need to dive in her inner world, she would have to meditate for several minutes, hence she was quite surprised when she heard Orochimaru’s voice several moments after she’d closed her eyes.

“You can open your eyes now,” he said.

Opening her eyes and seeing Orochimaru still drinking his tea with one hand, she was ready to ask whether something went wrong, but as she moved her gaze to the right of him, her question died before she could voice it.

It looked as if someone had drawn an invisible line on the table, beyond that line it transitioned into something else entirely, it was still a table, but a totally different one. And the surroundings were different too. As she moved her gaze further to the right, she saw _her_. Definitely an Uzumaki, she was…

“…so pretty,” exhaled Kushina.

“I suppose.”

“Is she all right?” asked Kushina worryingly. Her worry was understandable, after all the only memory Orochimaru had of this girl was her choking on food.

“As far as I recall, she was swiftly rescued by her companion.”

“Was he an Uzumaki too?”

“I very much doubt it,” said Orochimaru. With his words, the image of the girl disappeared and everything went back to normal.

Minato heard everything, the only difference between him and Kushina was that he didn’t see the image. However, seeing and hearing Kushina’s reaction, he could somewhat imagine what it was like to be in her place.

“That’s a handy technique,” he said.

“Not really,” said Orochimaru. “It requires too much and gives too little. One of my failed projects,” he commented offhandedly.

“Why failed, though? It seemed to be working fine.”

“It was never supposed to be a way to share memories.” Seeing silent question on Minato’s face, Orochimaru continued. “Initially, it was supposed to be a tool to alter subjective time perception. I was trying to achieve that by fusing inner world meditation with genjutsu. That idea manifested itself as neither meditation nor genjutsu, because I’m never entering the inner world nor am I using a proper genjutsu. However, you hearing that,” Orochimaru referred to his dialog with Kushina during the technique, “is a proof that it’s not working.”

Minato glanced at Kushina. Her gaze was wandering all over the room, never once did it land on Minato. She didn’t say anything, but he knew exactly what she was thinking.

“We cannot dispatch a unit to fetch this Uzumaki,” he said.

“Why?”

“That country is a mess right now,” said Minato. “I mean, had I received Orochimaru’s information a year ago, I would have paid for the mission personally. Unfortunately, I’ve read a report recently which stated that, well… the purges had started.”

“The purges?” asked Kushina.

“A civil war basically,” said Minato.

“Oh no, she could get killed,” she muttered.

“I don’t think so,” blurted Orochimaru.

Kushina gave him a questioning look. At that moment Orochimaru thought that he shouldn’t have said that. Now he would have to lie.

“Her companion,” he had to choose his words carefully, “is a long-term acquaintance of mine. I’m sure he’ll keep her safe.”

While Kushina wanted Orochimaru to elaborate, Minato seemed content with that answer. In fact, Minato wanted to shift Kushina’s focus from the Water country, he wanted to switch the topic.

“Very well then,” he said. “Do you remember that deal we had a week ago?”

“Of course, I do,” said Orochimaru. “Don’t worry though. I’m fully aware that it might take months or even years before that seal works and—”

“Kushina has agreed to teach you regardless of the result.”

Orochimaru looked at Kushina, attempting to find a confirmation of Minato’s words. Humming thoughtfully, she nodded to herself.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll start with some history.”

“Right now?” Orochimaru raised an eyebrow.

“You have any objections?”

“None at all.” With a puff of smoke, a notepad and a pen appeared in his hands.

“I thought as much.” She closed her eyes for a moment collecting her memories. “The most important thing you should know about Uzumaki is quite counterintuitive. I bet, every time you’ve seen a sealing technique used, it involved some kind of surface and ink.” Orochimaru nodded, but Kushina didn’t seem to notice that. “You see, the most perplexing thing about Uzumaki is that…”

* * *

“…they’ve used neither ink nor paper to store the knowledge about their techniques. How did they do it, you might ask? As a matter of fact — vocally.” The contempt in Tobirama’s voice was almost tangible. “And while you could argue that it was an ingenious plan to secure information, I’m quite sure that it was just a stupid tradition. Their way of preserving knowledge was nothing short of disgraceful.”

“You seem to be bothered by it,” said Kurama.

“I am bothered.” Tobirama massaged his temple. “I get a headache every time I think about it. I mean, how could they be so knowledgeable, yet so shortsighted,” he sighed. “This vocal tradition eventually caused their demise.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is widely known that several world’s nations united to destroy Uzumaki’s out of fear of fuinjutsu. The thing is, had the elders of the village taken part in battle, the Uzumaki would have won.”

“What makes you think they didn’t fight?” Kurama wondered. “I mean, were you there?”

“No, I’ve arrived there long after the battle. However, I’ve made one major discovery, while exploring the ruins of the village. The whole village was demolished, but area at the very center of the village was… missing.”

“Missing?” Kurama raised an eyebrow.

“Hm, well…” Tobirama stretched his hand, palm facing the ground. They were currently outside of the house. A seal formed in the air, under his palm. It was the very same seal he’d shown to Kurama earlier, but this time it was much bigger. With a hissing sound, it was triggered. And a part of the ground under the seal was flattened. “It was like that,” he pointed at the ground.

“You mean they…” the gears in Kurama’s head started turning, “…sealed that area?”

“That was my initial theory,” said Tobirama. “I thought they had sealed themselves with a part of village’s population—like children, for instance—, had waited for the enemy to pass, and afterwards, had gone to live elsewhere. It sounds reasonable until you start asking yourself — ‘Then where did they go?’

At the time, I wanted to know more about what’s known as ‘traditional fuinjutsu’. Which is why I started searching for the supposed survivors. I visited the nations who were behind that attack and went through their archives. And as it turned out, one of them had a register from Uzushio. The fact is, that this register contained marks which were made by the attacker. And by marks, I mean that almost everyone was marked ‘dead’. Which means that they’ve went through the process of identifying every single body.”

“Why would they bother?”

“Oh, I’m getting to it. So almost everyone was marked as ‘dead’. However, the leader of the village, the elders and several elite shinobi were marked as ‘missing in action’.”

“They were the ones that hid in the seal!”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Tobirama. “Yet, I wasn’t completely satisfied with my discovery. Even with that register and the pictures of those who went missing, it would have been a hard task to find them. So, I continued searching for more clues, but focused mostly around that archive which was by the way in the Earth country. What I eventually found wasn’t pretty.”

“What wasn’t pretty?”

“The trophies.” The memories brought scowl to Tobirama’s face. “Someone tried to achieve longevity by harvesting body parts from the dead Uzumaki. And that was exactly what I found — body parts of the dead Uzumaki. And as disgusting as it was, I saw an opportunity. So, I picked one at random and attempted to resurrect them. Unfortunately—”

“Wait, wait, wait, wait, what do you mean resurrect?” asked Kurama. “You can resurrect the dead?”

“If I have their genetic material — yes. It’s one of my more prominent achievements in fuinjutsu. I’ll teach you that later. So, as I was saying, unfortunately the technique didn’t work. I’ve tried lots of organs there, none of them worked. Which begs a question — why? Well, the technique has only one condition, which is that the one who is being resurrected have to be not in the mortal world. And I’m referring to one’s soul… which in most cases is synonymous with chakra.

And I know only two ways to get a soul to stick in the mortal world. One of them is, obviously, being alive. As I was holding someone’s dead, frozen liver, I concluded that being alive was certainly not the case. Which leaves us with the second way. It involves fuinjutsu and is basically sealing a soul within the mortal realm.”

“Are you saying that somehow everyone was sealed? That doesn’t make much sense.”

“It doesn’t, because they weren’t sealed in the most traditional sense.” He paused thinking how to convey his thoughts less sophisticated.

“They were used as a fuel basically. Not only Uzumaki, but every single person on the territory of Uzushio that day, was used as a fuel to power a technique which was conducted at the center of the village.”

“And you know that… how?” That previous statement seemed like a logical leap to Kurama.

“By accident… You could say that I’ve managed to find them.”

“The Uzumaki?”

“Yeah, the missing ones… oh, and the building too.”


	14. Chapter 14

“To understand the whole situation with the Uzumaki, do keep in mind the beginning of our conversation,” said Tobirama.

“Uh,” she took a moment to remember. “You mean their way of preserving knowledge?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “That is, essentially, the crux of this whole mystery. So,” he cleared his throat. “As I was saying, I’ve managed to find the missing Uzumaki. What’s interesting is that I’d met them exactly the day before I met you.”

“Oh!” Kurama interrupted him. “Does it have to do with that thing that has nothing to do with the Shinigami?” She was referring to their first conversation in the real world.

“It sure does, heh,” he let a little laugh, amused by her way of putting it. “I’m surprised you remember.”

“Hm, of course I do,” said Kurama. “ _After all, that was the first normal conversation I’ve had in decades._ ” She didn’t say that out loud.

“That thing was a mask,” Tobirama continued. “It was—and still is—an optional key to a technique which is known in Konoha as ‘Shiki Fujin’. The scroll written by none other than Mito Uzumaki,” Kurama scowled at the mention of her least favorite human, “describes the purpose of the technique as ‘to call upon the power of the Shinigami to assist in sealing’. She didn’t mention the mask, though.

So, long story short, I’ve decided to put it on. Probably, not the smartest decision, but one that was bound to be fruitful. And it was, it summoned this,” Tobirama summoned a shadow clone, who immediately used the Transformation technique to appear as a complete replica of Tobirama’s memory of the entity that he had summoned during his short stay at Konoha.

“I remember it,” said Kurama.

“No wonder you remember it, it was used in an attempt to seal you several weeks ago.”

“So, is it how the God of Death looks like?” she wondered.

“I’m getting to it,” he said. “Look at it carefully, do you see something special? Something that stands out?”

Kurama looked at the transformed clone thoughtfully. The first thing that stood out was the size of that thing, it was twice the height of a normal human, but that feature probably wasn’t what Tobirama was expecting of her to notice. It was holding a knife in its teeth; the facial features were rather sharp. It was holding its hands wide open as if trying to embrace something. She took a closer look at its hands and that was when she voiced her thoughts.

“Are those…” she hesitated.

“Seals?” finished Tobirama. “Partially.”

And indeed, the hands and forearms of the supposed Death God were covered with ink.

“Why would a Death God need seals?”

“That’s a good starting question to unveil the identity of this thing. I want you to remember our recent lesson on fuinjutsu. And when you do, please answer this simple question: What components does every seal have?”

“Um,” the lesson was fresh in her memory, “they are trigger, pathway and…” Suddenly realized what Tobirama was hinting at, “… a medium.”

“And there you have it. This thing is merely a seal, a container.” He paused for a moment reconsidering his choice of words. “‘Merely’ is probably the wrong word to describe it. It is a very exotic seal. As you’ve probably already guessed, I couldn’t help but venture inside of it. My previous choice of words about the mask wasn’t arbitrary, because it is, in fact, a key. A key that allows getting in without an entrance fee.”

“Entrance fee?”

“If a mortal were to use that technique without a mask, he would have his chakra split into Yin and Yang, with Yin being able to get inside but not outside. This process in and of itself is basically what death is. That is probably the only connection this seal has to death. So, in a way, dying can be called an entrance fee when speaking in the context of this technique.”

“What would happen if I were to use it?” she wondered.

“That’s…” he trailed, “complicated. You’ll understand eventually if you continue to study fuinjutsu.”

Kurama didn’t mind that, she was just wondering. It’s not like she wanted to use it, especially if it was just an ‘exotic container’.

“So, I went inside,” he continued. “And the insides were, well… mildly anticlimactic. It _was_ impressive, yes… but still, I had expected to see something else. The impressive part was that someone had managed to seal a whole dimension in this relatively small medium.” He gestured towards his transformed clone. “The unimpressive part was that it had been almost empty. There was nothing save for a single building. You can probably guess what building I’m talking about.”

“The one missing from the Uzumaki settlement.”

“Yes, that would be correct,” he said. “The building, though, made me question my own sanity.”

“Why?”

“Because from what I’ve said earlier it logically follows that yang representation of chakra cannot be present within this seal. Which means that no physical object can be inside. And the building was very much physical… so were the bones inside of it. That is how I met the missing Uzumaki.” He paused giving Kurama a chance to ask questions.

“But,” she started hesitantly. “If they had been already dead, how did you know what happened in Uzushio during the battle?”

“There was a message, engraved on the walls. The message described a… ‘major fuck-up’ I believe, is the right term. It was left by those, whose bones were lying along those walls. It described what they had been trying to achieve and where it eventually led them. The message was written in a rather fatalistic tone which was understandable. After all, I didn’t think they had hoped for it to be actually read by someone, nor had they hoped to survive. I thought it was their way to make at least a semblance of peace with their conscience.

It was quite long, but to give you the gist of it… They’d known about the attack and although they had predicted that they would be a likely winner, the price was unacceptable to them. They wanted to come out of that battle with as little casualties as possible. So, they came up with this selfless plan, where the older generation would sacrifice themselves for the youth to live. And if you think about it, the deal was a bargain, since we are not talking about the whole older generation of the Uzumaki. We are merely talking about the leader of the village, the elders and several elite shinobi.

How were they going to accomplish that? Well, there was this secret technique that was passed on among the members of the reigning family. Some even believed it capable of summoning the Shinigami himself.” That last sentence was a pure mockery, for both Tobirama and Kurama knew how it ended.

“Now that we know the beginning and the ending of the story,” continued Tobirama. “That leaves us with the middle. What was the process? How did such pure and noble intentions, resulted into such cruel and disastrous consequences? The answer is ignorance… but let me expand on that.

They performed the ritual. And when they appeared inside of that thing,” Tobirama pointed to his clone once again, “I bet for the first few moments they were probably celebrating their success. That is until the amalgamation of their relatives followed shortly after—”

“Um,” Kurama was forced to interrupt him. “What do you mean by that?”

“Hm, right, to understand what I mean, you should know the basic principles of that technique. You see, for all its complexity, it remains a simple container. The major differences between that technique and the one that I’ve taught you earlier are that the former somehow has a dimension sealed inside of it and a weird entrance condition. Every condition, however, can be bypassed should you have enough chakra. That is exactly what happened there. Those who performed ritual bypassed the condition of splitting their yin and yang chakra and effectively sealed themselves within that ancient container. However, everything has its price.

Their ignorant actions left the technique… you could say ‘hungry’. And… well, it feasted on those who were in the vicinity. In one moment, the whole population of Uzushio and probably everyone who was close enough had their yin and yang chakra split, basically rendering them dead. Death, however, would have been much more preferable to what they had actually gotten. You see, their yin chakra flowed into the seal… simultaneously. And the unfortunate property of yin chakra is that it mixes extremely well with another yin chakra. That’s how we create genjutsu.

Minds of tens of thousands of souls flowed towards this tiny container. True, it’s enormous on the inside, yet it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the tiny entrance. It forced all that yin chakra to mix, effectively forming one substance from those tens of thousands of minds.

“Uzumaki—those who slipped into the seal bypassing the condition—for all their ignorance to that one technique, weren’t stupid. They had eventually a clear understanding of what they’d done. Some of them took their lives on the spot, those who were more stoic left the message, sealed that abhorrent amalgamation somewhere within that realm and followed their less stoic friends shortly after. I didn’t check whether that abomination was still there. I left the seal shortly after reading that message. And… that’s it. The story of the Uzumaki demise. A tragedy caused by ignorance.”

For several minutes silence prevailed. It was a lot to take and Kurama was processing the new information.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“What exactly?”

“Weren’t they the ones that created that seal? How could they use it so carelessly?”

“You have to remember that knowledge about the techniques has always been stored vocally. Mito Uzumaki was the first to define that tradition. As I’ve told earlier, she thought that the technique’s purpose was summoning the Shinigami for the assistance in sealing. The village leader thought that its purpose was summoning the Shinigami for the assistance in battle. As you can see, close… but not identical. Within one generation the information about the purpose of that technique has gotten distorted. How many generations were there? How many times has it been distorted? The true purpose of this technique likely will never be recovered.”

“What’s your theory?” asked Kurama suddenly.

“What makes you think that I have one?”

“I’d like to think that I know you well enough to tell that you won’t settle for a simple ‘I don’t know’”

“Heh… Well, I don’t have proofs, but… I think that the original purpose went something like: ‘to bring death to a god’ rather than ‘to summon a Death God’. Yet, even if we assume that this flimsy speculation is true, I cannot imagine a being powerful enough to require an artificial dimension to be sealed. Can you?” That last bit was rhetorical, but Kurama didn’t know that.

“Mm,” she hummed in confirmation. An image of a beautiful woman with sweeping white hair clear in her mind.

“What?” asked Tobirama incredulously.

“What?”

“You can?”

“You said it yourself, no? A god.” Kurama didn’t elaborate. She indeed hated Mito Uzumaki a lot, but if there was one being whom she hated even more, then it would be that damn goddess Kaguya.

Tobirama wanted to inquire further, but their dialogue was interrupted by the appearance of Mei.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she overheard the ending of their conversation, “but I have a favor to ask.”


	15. Chapter 15

Orochimaru was on his way home, but ever since he had left Kushina’s house, there was this nagging feeling as if he had forgotten something. That feeling was a rarity to him. He was extremely precise when it came to daily routine planning. Not being able to put a finger on it, had made him frustrated, confused and a little annoyed. Fortunately enough, he was about to be saved.

He was walking automatically, one hand stroking his chin, his eyes staring down on the ground. His unconscious was leading him to his home, while his conscious was trying to traceback his day in an attempt to remember what he had forgotten.

At some point during his thoughtful journey, his body came to an abrupt stop. That is to say, he was not able to proceed, something was pushing against the upper part of his chest. He focused his sight on that thing.

“ _A hand,_ ” he noted absentmindedly, “ _allegedly female.”_ Using his exquisite factual knowledge, he was able to deduce that a hand was usually attached to a body. Slowly he moved his sight, passing the forearm, elbow, and pausing at the shoulder. And indeed, it _was_ attached to a body. His thoughts continued to flourish, he thought that a body usually belonged to someone. With that in mind he moved his sight slightly higher and to the right. A pair of brown eyes was staring back at him.

“Tsunade,” he voiced his conclusion. For certainly, in front of him was standing Tsunade, her hand pushed against his upper chest, successfully stopping him.

“Didn’t you forget something?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, I did.” A glimmer of hope flickered in his mind. Diligently, he waited for Tsunade to continue. However, Orochimaru’s answer prompted Tsunade to think that he was well aware of what he’d forgotten, hence she waited for his excuses. None followed, silence prevailed.

Who knows how long would they wait there, was it not for a curious pair of eyes peeking from behind Tsunade’s leg? Having had his mind fully woken up, Orochimaru could feel that he was being stared at. Naturally, when his eyes landed on the one responsible, he immediately remembered.

“Ah… the kid,” he said, a name ‘Kimimaro’ clear in his mind. “I assume you took care of him this past week.” Seeing affirmative nod from Tsunade, he continued. “Then I suppose I owe you one.”

“Not really, had you decided to fetch him earlier, I would have probably refused. So, no — you don’t owe me a thing.”

“Oh.”

“I wasn’t searching for you to bring back the kid. I mean that was not the only reason… I wanted to talk.” Her body language indicated that the talk was not for the public eye.

“Sure,” he said. “Follow me.”

With his confidence in tomorrow restored, Orochimaru continued to walk to his house. Tsunade and Kimimaro followed closely after.

* * *

Tobirama resisted the urge to yawn. Mei was continuously talking. She’d been going on and on about how the current regime was wrong. She had yet to ask for a favor, but in all honesty, Tobirama had already known what it was. Ever since he had demonstrated his proficiency in fuinjutsu, he knew that it was only a matter of time before she would ask him to participate in war. He also had his answer right away.

He wasn’t going to take any part in this war… or at least that was his primary intention. He found himself hesitating. Was it his decision to make? He reminded himself that he should account for another opinion. Naturally, his eyes landed on Kurama.

“What do you say?” he asked.

“About what?” She hadn’t made an effort to predict Mei’s intention, nor had she had an access to Tobirama’s thoughts. And because Mei had yet to announce what this ‘favor’ was all about, to Kurama it looked as if Mei was simply rambling about how bad her country was.

And to Mei who had been so rudely interrupted by Tobirama, it looked like no one was listening to her. Before she could muster any kind of objection, Tobirama elaborated on his question.

“She,” he gestured towards Mei, “wants us to partake in this war.”

For some reason Tobirama’s insightful statement made Mei feel uncomfortable.

“I was getting to it,” she said meekly.

Kurama’s experience with wars had been quite monotonous. She had never had a choice. Every time a war had taken place, she was regarded only as a prize, a strategic resource. Being asked an opinion on that matter was rather novice to her. Yet ever since she had taken part in the first human war, her opinion didn’t change. Kurama didn’t like wars.

“Why would I want it?”

“That’s a good question,” he said. “In fact, that question is the sole reason I’m even considering her request. Why _would_ you want it? Do you remember the time I was talking about human emotions? Specifically, the part where I’ve said that my words don’t matter.”

Kurama did remember, “You said that no amount of words would substitute for the actual experience.”

“This war might give you a great insight into the lowest and—what might sound counterintuitive—the highest of human emotions.”

“I…” Kurama was hesitant, she glanced at Mei, who was listening them intently. Kurama didn’t want to be seen as weak by anyone. Yet Tobirama had already seen her at her lowest. She moved very close to him and whispered in his ear, “I don’t want to fight.”

“We won’t, we’ll leave before the first serious encounter,” he whispered in return, and then continued louder so that Mei could hear, “We won’t play primary part in this war, nor will we play a secondary one. Our interests lie in the tertiary one.”

“What does it even mean?” asked Mei.

“It means that we will be by your side only during the first phase of your little rebellion.”

“And that would be…?” Mei’s knowledge about the process of war was quite general. One part of her was glad that there was someone who was more knowledgeable on the topic, but the other part of her couldn’t help but wonder — “ _How does he know that?”_. One thought led to the other and now she was wondering — “ _Just how old is he?_ ”. With her mind full of unasked questions, she almost missed Tobirama’s answer.

“The assemblance of your forces.”

* * *

“What about the other child?” asked Tsunade.

“You mean Anko?”

Tsunade was sitting in Orochimaru’s living room, the Snake Sanin was there too. The room was very generic, and gave off the feeling of not being used often.

“So, her name is Anko, huh?”

“Yes,” said Orochimaru. “She is yet to be collected from the orphanage. The bureaucracy behind adoption is rather slow.”

“You’re talking as if you’re not adopting a child, but acquiring an asset,” she said in a judging tone.

“That’s,” he hesitated for a moment, but decided to go through with that bit of information, “because she is an asset.” Seeing as Tsunade was about to blow up because of the morality behind his statement, he swiftly continued. “Konoha needs a Snake Sanin.”

“What?”

“Tsunade, I am not immortal,” _yet_ he added mentally.

“Oh,” it dawned on her. “You’re going to make her your student.”

“Basically,” he nodded. “She’ll be a substitute for a Snake Sanin when the right time comes.”

“What about Kimimaro? Is he going to be your student too?”

“He is an accident,” he said indifferently.

“Orochimaru!”

“It’s the truth,” he shrugged. “I was not expecting to stumble across the mass suicide, with him being the last survivor. I was never planning on adopting him.”

“In that case, do you mind if I… take him as my pupil?”

“Oh?” he raised an eyebrow.

“I mean, I can’t adopt him because—”

“He would become the Senju clan heir,” interrupted Orochimaru. “Yes, I’m aware of that. Am I correct to assume, that you want me to be his parent on paper, while in reality you’ll be busy with his education?”

Tsunade nodded. Orochimaru looked over his shoulder, there somewhere in his house his clone was explaining Kimimaro the safety instructions. Orochimaru’s house was not a safe place for kids.

“Personally,” said Orochimaru, “I have no use for him.” That statement prompted another judging look from Tsunade. “However, the problem lies in his psychology. He sees me as his messiah. This attitude might cause some… complications.”

Tsunade could work with that.

“Also,” continued Orochimaru. “I’m curious, why are you so interested in this boy? You were never the type to think about passing your knowledge.” Orochimaru knew about Tsunade’s sole apprentice Shizune. That child was the niece of Tsunade’s deceased lover Dan. Orochimaru was almost certain that this student, was Tsunade’s way to atone for the death of Dan, for surely, she had been blaming herself for his death. Tsunade had never been interested in taking students. Shizune was an exception to the rule.

“It’s his immune system it’s…”

“Ah, I see.”

“You knew?”

Oddly enough Orochimaru wasn’t answering. He adopted a rather thoughtful expression. He was thinking whether she should tell her more about Kimimaro.

“ _Well,”_ he thought. _“I didn’t lie when I said that I have no use for him.”_

“Orochimaru?”

“I’m well aware that he is basically immune to every known disease. Have you discovered why?”

“It’s his body structure, it’s—” she stopped seeing as Orochimaru raised his hand.

“Let me save you some time there. Their Bloodline Limit changes their body structure by quite a large margin. In fact, the changes are so drastic that they could be considered different species. They might be immune to known _human_ diseases, but that also makes them open to something different. In Kimimaro’s particular case, I have reasons to think that he won’t live past sixteen.”

“All the more reason to make him my student. I’m sure I can do something about his condition.”

“Yes,” agreed Orochimaru. “You’re probably the only one who can possibly solve his predicament. It is settled then. I’ll give you everything I know about his clan. As to his psychological state, we’ll make his apprenticeship a gradual process. How does that sound to you?”

“Sounds great.” She stood up and moved to the exit. “Orochimaru,” she glanced back at him.

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Now that Orochimaru thought about it. Staying in Konoha had been a surprisingly fruitful decision on his part.


	16. Chapter 16

The clans in the Land of Water were very scattered. Mei had quite a simple plan in her mind. She and her two newfound companions, would visit some of her acquaintances and try to persuade them to join the rebellion. Also, their route would go through as many clan territories as possible. Mei was certain that, since the threat was very much against every shinobi who had a Bloodline Limit in their possession, clans would listen to her, therefore providing military power.

“Are you sure that you want to do the talking?” asked Tobirama.

“Trust me,” said Mei, “diplomacy is in my blood.”

“All right.”

Earlier Mei had managed to use her summon and send a message to one of her friends. She had received a reply with a location attached to it, stating that he was willing to meet and discuss their current predicament. The said location was three days away from the small mountain village they were currently approaching.

“Do we need to go in?” asked Kurama. Her opinion on humanity had hardly changed, she didn’t like humans. The village was, obviously, a natural habitat to this specimen, hence her conclusion: she would appreciate avoiding it.

“What’s wrong, princess? Don’t want to get dirty talking to peasants?” said Mei venomously. “Well, don’t you worry, I’ll handle the talking while you can just wait outside.”

Mei was playing with fire, yet one could hardly blame her. She hadn’t the slightest idea whom she was talking to, in fact, she didn’t even know her name. That’s right, Kurama was yet to introduce herself and, frankly, she wasn’t going to. Not knowing how to refer to Kurama, Mei had addressed that problem to Tobirama, who had given an offhanded comment, “You can try ‘princess’.” Since then Mei started to tease Kurama in all sorts of ways.

“Weird,” said Mei.

“Hm?”

“The Yuki clan is known to be small, but… not this small,” said Mei thoughtfully.

And indeed, the village they had just entered, was very small. It had looked big from the distance, but now taking a closer look they could see that most of the buildings were abandoned. No one was there to greet them or to chase them away. There was only one old man outside, splitting wood. Mei didn’t go to that man. Instead, she went to the building that looked a little different than the others.

“Wait here, I’ll be right back,” she said.

She knocked on the door of differently looking building, someone opened. Mei said something inaudibly and was let inside. Meanwhile, Tobirama took another look around. The village felt dead, why was it like this? What had happened? He needed more information. His eyes locked on the old man, who was masterfully wielding his axe. The man was crackling old, yet it looked like the axe was his second nature.

Chop.

Chop.

Chop.

The sound of an axe splitting the wood and hitting the stump was the only thing that disrupted grave silence of the village. Tobirama noted that there was a second stump with an axe stuck in it, a simple plan formed in his head. He turned and moved very close to Kurama.

“See that man over there?” he whispered.

Kurama glanced at the old man and nodded.

“I need you to stay here, while I go and talk to him.”

Kurama nodded once again, and with that Tobirama moved in the direction of the old man. He moved closer and closer when finally, he reached that man and continued walking passing him. He moved to the stump where another axe was stuck. Wordlessly he picked a log and unstuck the axe.

Chop. Chop.

Chop. Chop.

Chop. Chop.

Now the sound of two people chopping wood filled the air. It continued for several minutes, and then the old man stopped.

“Ask your questions, son,” he grunted.

“What happened to Yuki clan?” Tobirama thought that being direct was the best policy here.

“The ice-wielding freaks? Dead.” Although Tobirama wanted to know exactly how they died, he thought against it. He needed to know as much as possible with as little words as possible.

“Are there any left?”

The man didn’t answer for several moments, contemplating Tobirama.

“Tell you what, son. You see this axe?” He moved his axe close to his face. “If there’s a _freak_ in this village, I’ll chop their head with this very axe.” He spat scornfully on the ground. With that, the conversation was over, he moved to collect the firewood.

Tobirama returned to the place where Kurama was waiting for him, a thoughtful look on his face.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“He made it clear that Yuki clan members are not welcomed here.” Before Kurama could inquire any further, the door of the house to which Mei had gone earlier opened. Mei left the house and moved to Tobirama and Kurama.

“It’s useless,” she said from the start, but before Tobirama could agree and tell her what he had gathered, she continued, “even those two are pretty much useless.”

“What?” Tobirama found himself asking.

“Apparently, there’s an untrained woman from Yuki clan, who had a child from her civilian husband. The child possesses the Bloodline Limit, but was never trained,” she shrugged.

“How do you know the child possesses—” he stopped, seeing as Mei waived a chakra paper in her hand.

“We have nothing left to do here, let’s move out,” said Mei and moved to the exit of the village. Slowly Kurama and Tobirama followed her. “Aren’t you glad, princess?” said Mei cheerfully. “You didn’t get to talk to peasants.” But Kurama didn’t listen to her. She was watching Tobirama. To her, it was clear that something was bothering him.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I need a moment to think,” he said as they continued walking towards the exit.

There was indeed something that was bothering Tobirama. A puzzle of sorts… The old man had made it clear that Yuki were despised in this village. Yet, Mei had said that a Yuki and a civilian were married and had a child, who had inherited the genome. Which means that either Mei lied about that family or that man lied about the attitude towards Yuki. However, neither of them had any reason to lie. Could it be that neither of them lied?

“ _If both were telling the truth… could it be that the husband didn’t know?”_ thought Tobirama.

“Was the husband present during your talk with Yuki?” he said out loud.

“Of course,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

He stopped and took a look around, they hadn’t left the village yet but moved quite a distance from the populated part.

“What are you looking for?” asked Mei.

“An observation point,” he answered thoughtfully. The village was situated in a natural pit, high in the mountains, so there were plenty of suitable observation points. “Follow me,” he said, eyeing a particular tree on the hill.

* * *

The tree, Tobirama had chosen, was quite gigantic, they had no problems finding a branch to sit on. From their spot, they could clearly see the center of the village, which was its sole inhabited part.

“What are you expecting to see?” asked Mei. She couldn’t quite comprehend why Tobirama was so insistent on observing the village.

“Consequences,” was his short answer.

“Consequences of what?”

“Your actions,” he said.

“Huh? You’re expecting more of the Yuki clan to appear or what?”

Surprisingly enough, it was not Tobirama who answered.

“I think, it’s quite the contrary,” said Kurama. “He’s expecting to see less of them.”

“Pretty much,” he agreed, “but let’s not talk much. I want both of you to watch and learn, it’s bound to be a valuable lesson.”

Mei still couldn’t understand what they were talking about and attempted to ask once more, but Tobirama just gestured her to look closely. And so, she did. For several minutes nothing happened, every house was standing still, no living soul was outside. And then the door of the house opened. It was the house that Mei had visited earlier.

A sole figure emerged from the building. Although the distance between her and the figure was quite long, Mei was able to recognize the husband of the family she had contacted earlier. What was he going to do? She concentrated on that figure. Not for long though, for as quickly as he had emerged from his house, he was just as quick to hide in the neighboring one. Was she supposed to learn from that?

Again, several minutes passed. Mei thought that they were wasting time. She was about to insist on hurrying to the rendezvous point when the door of the neighboring house opened. The same man emerged once again, but now there was someone else following him. Mei didn’t know who that was, but she could see that the other person was holding an axe. For the next half an hour, the process was repeated over and over again. Each time there were more people following that man.

“What’s going on?” Mei wondered.

“He’s assembling a mob,” came a short answer from Tobirama.

“I can see that,” said Mei. “Why is he doing that? I’m sure that I made it quite clear that rebellion doesn’t need civilians.”

“Oh?” Mei’s statement earned a raised eyebrow from Tobirama. “You think he’s assembling the mob to help your rebellion?”

“Of course,” Mei was certain. “Why else would he do that?”

Tobirama didn’t answer. Meanwhile, the mob stood in front of the house Mei had visited earlier. Each and every one of them had some sort of makeshift weapon in their hands. The man, who had been recognized earlier by Mei, was standing in front of them, saying something. Mei was too far away to hear him.

“How many civilians does it take to kill one shinobi?” asked Tobirama suddenly.

“ _What does it have to do with anything?_ ”, she thought. Nevertheless, she answered, “It depends on shinobi’s skill level.”

“What if she was never trained and also had a child to protect?”

It was at that moment that Mei finally realized the grim purpose of the mob. She could feel fear slowly creeping in, surrounding her heart with its chilling embrace.

She leaped immediately from the branch and ran in the direction of the house. Deep down she knew, it was already too late. The mob flooded the house. None of them could be seen outside.

She was an arm’s length from the entrance, when the building erupted with ice, knocking her away. She tried to stabilize herself in the air, but failed and landed uncomfortably face down on the ground. She pushed her body up from the ground, rising to her knees and lifted her head, fixating her gaze on the building. It was…

…as if some wicked sculptor had chiseled the timeless image of dread and destruction. The building was half destroyed and the peak of the explosion was captured in a sole transparent crystal of ice. The bodies caught midair, eyes staring and mouths open in a silent scream of terror.

It was a single most majestic and horrifying image that would haunt Mei in her dreams for a long time. For now, though, she could feel someone touching the back of her head. And with that, her conscience was no more.

* * *

She put her hand on the surface, she could clearly see the face underneath. The surface felt cold. She had expected that, after all, she was touching ice. She glanced back and caught an image of Tobirama lifting Mei’s unconscious body on his shoulder.

“They’re still alive,” she said.

“Not for much longer.”

“Is that why you knocked her out?” she wondered. “To stop her from saving them?”

“If she wants to be a leader,” said Tobirama. “She needs to learn the value of her decisions. Which is usually measured in human lives.”

A sound of crackling ice interrupted their dialogue. One moment Kurama could feel Tobirama’s hand on her waist, the next they were on the roof of a nearby building, his head cautiously peeking at the frozen building. Kurama followed his example and took a peek herself.

The section of the house where the entrance had been, slowly broke down and a child emerged from within the crystal. The boy took several steps forward and fell to his knees, body trembling.

“Was he the one who did that?” whispered Kurama, gesturing towards the ice crystal.

“Most likely,” whispered Tobirama in return.

“So, what do we do next?”

“We…” he trailed, thinking about the best course of action. Could the child be of any use? He was leaning towards a ‘no’, but then Kurama said something that changed his mind.

“He feels simultaneously tense and tranquil.” Then she mumbled, “What a queer combination.”

“That’s because he’s shocked. He is yet to realize what he has done,” he said. He remembered when Kurama had said that she could feel emotions of others. This peculiar ability in combination with an isolated child created unique conditions for a rather ruthless experiment. After all, the most genuine emotions are those of a child.

“ _It would take us four days,”_ he thought, glancing at unconscious Mei. “ _I should keep her unconscious for that period of time._ ” With a plan formed in his head, he turned to Kurama.

“Listen closely,” he said. “For the next four days I want you to use this ability of yours as much as possible, concentrate on everything he feels, meanwhile I’ll manipulate him into going to the meeting point.”

“But I don’t know half the names humans use for emotions,” she protested weakly.

“Then just describe it to me as vividly as possible, I’m not going anywhere.”

“But you said—”

“I’ll be manipulating him, yes. Indirectly, with illusions. I won’t talk to him.”

“All right,” said Kurama and concentrated on the child. She could feel the so familiar fear slowly rising within the boy.


	17. Chapter 17

The rustling of paper was the only audible sound in the room. Sarutobi Hiruzen was going through everything Jiraiya had managed to find on Marotabi Jusen, and the more he read, the more frustrated he felt. He shot a look to his right where Jiraiya was occupying his windowsill.

“It can’t be true,” he shook papers in his hands. “There has to be more to it.”

“I’ve checked it several times,” said Jiraiya. “There’s little reason to think that it’s fake. Also, it’s as complete as it gets.”

Sarutobi glanced back at papers. The problem was not in the lack of information, on the contrary, it laid within an excessive amount of said information. Some of the reports even contained photographs. However, these photographs hardly contributed to the solution of the problem, in fact, they were doing quite the opposite. You see, each photograph contained a different individual.

“So, according to these documents, there’s a Marotabi Jusen in almost every neighboring country,” said Sarutobi. “Not only that, but every single one of them is part of the royal court in the corresponding country.”

Jiraiya nodded.

“That’s preposterous!”

“That was my reaction when I received the first two reports on two different people,” said Jiraiya.

“Could it be a masquerading shinobi?”

“I’ve checked that possibility.” Jiraiya moved from the windowsill closer to the desk where the papers were laid. He moved some of them and put aside a single photograph. “Look,” he said pointing at two people in the photograph. Hiruzen could clearly remember that those two people were in the reports he had just read. They both went by the same name ‘Marotabi Jusen’ and they were both in the picture.

“He could have used clones,” he said hesitantly.

“No,” said Jiraiya.

“No?”

“Some of those people,” he pointed at the pile of reports, “were present at the events which took place in different countries and roughly at the same time. That leads me to believe that they are real people. But…”

“But what?”

“There’s one thing that stands out, aside from their names.”

“And that is…?”

“I couldn’t find any data on their everyday lives. It’s as if they only exist within the royal court and occasionally attend important events,” said Jiraiya.

“Do you think there’s some sort of scheme involved?”

“Almost certainly,” said Jiraiya. “Moreover, I think daimios are in on it.”

“Hmm, that is rather troubling,” said Hiruzen.

“Do you want me to keep looking into it?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a wise idea. Your job is done here, Jiraiya. Thank you.”

“Are you sure?” asked Jiraiya hesitantly.

“Absolutely.”

“All right then,” he went to the window. “See you around, sensei.” With those words, he left.

Sarutobi gathered the documents. He opened a drawer and pulled out a blank piece of paper, he took the brush, and with several masterful strokes created a basic seal. With an impulse of chakra, he sealed the documents within, now stained, piece of paper.

“Perhaps, it’s time to visit an old friend,” he mumbled to himself.

* * *

Mei was slowly but surely waking up. She could hear the conversation taking place right beside her.

“It’s like,” she heard the female voice, “he’s intentionally falling into the abyss.”

“Oh,” the other voice unmistakably belonged to Tobirama, “you’re getting better at it.”

“But what does it mean?”

“I don’t think that it’s possible to give a single distinct answer,” he said. “But if I had to guess, I would say that he’s contemplating suicide, and is about to solidify his resolve to do it.”

That was the last thing Mei had heard before an extreme migraine hit her. It was so strong that she gave an audible groan, disrupting the conversation, and attracting attention from its participants. Almost immediately she could feel a hand on her forehead. With a touch came a feeling of relief, at that point she decided to finally open her eyes.

Unsurprisingly, she could see Tobirama in front of her, with the familiar redhead peeking from behind his back. She glanced left and right without moving her head. She could see that they were on some sort of a bridge. She could also see that they were inside a barrier, though what kind of barrier it was — she didn’t know.

“What… happened?” she asked.

She saw that Tobirama tried to speak, but Kurama beat him to it.

“You were knocked out by an unknown shinobi,” she said.

“Uh-huh…” she trailed, but before she could confront the redhead, something caught her attention. It was quite a distance away from the barrier, but there could be no mistake, for there was only one sword that looked like this, and she was well aware of who was its current wielder.

“Zabuza!” she found herself exclaiming. Immediately, she got up and bolted towards the familiar face. The barrier seemed to have let her through easily.

* * *

“What?” asked Kurama, trying not to meet Tobirama’s gaze.

“You lied.”

“I did.” She was fidgeting.

Tobirama thought of a reason to lie about such a trivial matter. He came up with the conclusion that Kurama simply wanted to cover up for him.

“I see,” he said. “I appreciate your attempt. However, that was a very sloppy lie.”

“Uh… sorry?”

“It’s fine,” he said. He turned his gaze towards Mei. She was talking to a rather tall person. Tobirama recognized the sword on stranger’s back. He also saw that the kid, whom they had observed for the last four days, was clinging to the stranger’s leg.

“We should say hello,” he said, gesturing for Kurama to follow. “You can dispel the barrier, it’s rather useless now.”

She nodded and dispelled the said barrier. She then followed Tobirama who was slowly approaching Mei and the tall swordsman.

* * *

Danzo was not a very outdoorsy person, he was rarely present during clan meetings. He couldn’t appreciate the human company and preferred to lead a secluded life. To put it bluntly, he was very hard to find, and only a select few could accomplish such a feat. Fortunately, Hiruzen was one of the select few.

Sitting in front of his old friend, Hiruzen couldn’t help but wonder, “ _How long has it been?”_

Danzo was scanning the documents with his sole eye. Minutes passed, he put the papers away and looked at Hiruzen.

“What do you want me to see here?” his tone was rather unimpressed, indifferent even.

This insouciance was definitely something Hiruzen hadn’t expected.

“What do you mean?” he asked incredulously. “Are you blind? Can’t you see that there’s some sort of scheme running through every nation? Moreover, it somehow involves sensei. Aren’t you even slightly concerned?”

That barrage of questions earned a raised eyebrow from Danzo.

“I know exactly what this scheme is,” he said. “After all, I was there when it was created. I suppose the only thing that surprises me a little is your lack of awareness.”

“So, you are the one responsible,” he said.

“No.”

“No?”

“Indeed, I was there when it was created, but it was not me who put it in place,” said Danzo. “I’ve never been a part of this scheme; no shinobi ever has. Except, of course, its creator.”

“Who?” Sarutobi was eager to know.

“You’re still referring to him as ‘sensei’.”

* * *

“… that is why I think it’d be better for us to split,” said Mei.

Her reasoning sounded rather flimsy, but ultimately it didn’t matter. Tobirama knew that Mei’s sudden decision to split was caused by that one Kurama’s lie. It caused a breach of trust and to restore said trust Mei had asked them to accomplish a non-essential task. She wanted them to concentrate on the clans that were scattered along the border of the country, while she would focus on those that were deeper into the country.

Tobirama thought that it was a great decision on her part. That way, if it turned out that she couldn’t trust him and Kurama, no major harm would be done.

“All right then,” he said. He unsealed a tiny scroll from within the seal on his wrist. It was a one-time summoning scroll. “Should the need arise, use it to contact me,” he handed it to her. 

She took the scroll, turned around, and started walking away. “See you in a month or two,” she said.

Tobirama didn’t reply. He was watching Mei, Zabuza, and the kid slowly walking away, his mind busy with half-formed thought. He couldn’t quite put it into words, but he had a feeling that he was missing something. Just as Mei and her new companions disappeared from view, it hit him like a lightning bolt.

“You did it on purpose,” he said, his voice dazed. The absence of people on the bridge made it clear that these words were addressed to Kurama. Tobirama didn’t let her confirm or deny them, he continued voicing his line of thought. “That lie _was_ supposed to be weak, it _was_ supposed to create a breach of trust which would inevitably lead to separation. The whole purpose of that one line… was to get rid of Mei.”

The more he spoke, the more she shrank inwardly. She was facing him with her back, she didn’t want to meet his gaze. Everything Tobirama had said was true, but she was ready to stand behind her decision. Her opinion of Mei was quite low, and if she had to be scolded in order to get rid of her, then so be it. She waited a moment, two moments, but all she could hear was silence. And then, finally, she heard… clapping?

Hesitantly, she turned around and glanced at Tobirama. There he stood, slowly clapping, his slightly smiling face watching her intently.

“I applaud your creativity. That was amazingly well executed.”

“You’re not angry?” she asked, confused.

“Why would I be? I can totally understand why you’d want her to leave.”

“But… this country…”

“…can burn to ashes for all I care.”

“I…” she didn’t know what to say, “I’m confused.”

“Then, I suppose, you’ve forgotten our original purpose of staying within borders of this country.” Seeing that Kurama’s confusion only grew, he explained. “We are here to avoid unwanted attention from Konoha. That’s it. Everything else is secondary. We can, and absolutely should, treat this country as a playground.”

“But…”

“There is no ‘but’. Get this: you are not obliged to save this country. You seem to confuse Mei’s desires with yours. Perhaps, that is because you’ve realized yours fairly recently,” he finished thoughtfully.

That, surprisingly, made a lot of sense. Kurama could clearly see that she thought about Mei’s problems as if they were her own. One thing, however, was bugging her.

“Do you really not care about this country?” she asked.

“Hm, maybe I should rephrase that,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t care, rather I have enough political aptitude to understand that Yagura’s regime will crumble regardless of Mei’s presence. His party will inevitably rot from the inside.”

“So, she doesn’t make a difference?”

“She does,” he said, “but not in the outcome of the war. She makes a difference in the duration of said war. Or I should say, her rebellion shall shorten the timeframe significantly.”

“Then… what should we do next?”

“Whatever you want,” said Tobirama.

“I…” the thought of being the one to decide was quite a pleasant one. She took a moment to collect her thoughts and tried to come up with a worthy objective, it was surprisingly easy to do. “I want to see a big city,” was her verdict.

“Really?” Tobirama was surprised. “I thought you didn’t like highly populated areas.”

“I still don’t,” she said. “But… If I want to solve my problems and satisfy my desires, I should reconsider this attitude.”

“A mature approach,” he said. “It should take us a week to get to the closest big settlement. While we’re on our way, we should continue the fuinjutsu lessons.” It sounded reasonable to Kurama.

“So, the concealing seals…”


	18. Chapter 18

“How much do you know about the establishment of the Shinobi Academy?” asked Danzo.

“What does it have to do—”

“Just answer the question,” interrupted Danzo.

“Hmm.” Sarutobi decided to indulge him. “The Academy was sensei’s idea, an investment into the youth. Konoha was the first village to act upon it. Later on, nearly every village followed our example.”

“That should suffice,” said Danzo. “Now listen closely: while it is true that we were the first village to use such a structure, to claim that this idea was original is to lie. The Academy started as a tweaked copy of the civilian school for aristocracy which, at the time, existed only within the capital.”

“It was a brilliant idea, regardless of its origin,” said Sarutobi defensively.

“I absolutely agree. I’m not berating it; I’m merely telling you its history.”

“I still fail to see how it has to do anything with the matter at hand.”

“I’m getting to it.” Danzo took a moment to collect his thoughts. “This establishment within the capital was a gateway to the civilian scientific society — a group that was used to set up this scheme.” He nodded towards the documents on the table. “The main information here is that Tobirama Senju had been closely cooperating with the civilian scholars.”

Sarutobi couldn’t help but wonder why. The civilian discoveries had always looked quite primitive when lined up with the ones from the ninja world. Their inability to use chakra was bound to be their bane. Sarutobi didn’t hesitate to voice his thoughts.

“My thoughts were quite similar,” said Danzo. “It was apparent to me that this relationship was rather one-sided. He would give too much and receive too little. Being young and foolish, I confronted him.”

“That couldn’t have ended well,” said Sarutobi.

“That’s an understatement.” Danzo touched his left cheek. “He slapped a seal right here. I remember collapsing right on spot, body feeling frail, air pushed out of me. It felt as if a single gust of wind would shatter my bones.”

“Chakra-suppressing seal?”

“Not quite,” he said. “He removed it almost immediately. I was lying on the ground, gasping for air, when he kneeled beside me and said that an average shinobi in a thousand years would be exactly like that.”

“With their chakra suppressed?”

“With their chakra deteriorated,” said Danzo. “He then shared his hypothesis that chakra in and of itself is becoming progressively worse with each generation. His cooperation with civilians was a way to mitigate the issue.”

“How so?” Sarutobi couldn’t quite grasp the role of civilians in this issue.

“Almost every scientific discovery we have is based on chakra. With chakra gone, we simply shan’t be able to use any of it,” said Danzo. “Nidaime engineered a solution to this issue. Basically, he wanted to boost civilian science, so that it could stand on equal footing with everything that’s based on chakra. That way, should the chakra fail us, we shall have a substitute ready for adoption. Now, ‘Marotabi Jusen’ is a small but significant part of this plan.”

“ _Finally,”_ thought Sarutobi.

“As you might have already guessed, it’s not a person, it’s a position. Moreover, it’s a position that can only be bought.”

“Bought? With money?”

“With knowledge,” said Danzo. “As far as I know, there are two conditions to be met if one wants to be in this position. First, they can’t be a shinobi. Second, they have to make a technological contribution. As to the benefits of this position, I’m not sure. I’ve never looked into it.”

“Really? Do you mean to say that you’ve never tried to take over that scheme? An agent with direct access to daimyo in every nation. It seems like a huge deal to me,” said Hiruzen. “I’m sorry, but I can’t see you passing up this opportunity.”

Danzo didn’t respond. For several minutes he was contemplating Hiruzen who, in turn, was reciprocating the action. There was complete silence, but that couldn’t continue for eternity. Danzo gave in.

“Then, I suppose, you know me well,” he said. “I did try to take it over, in fact, I’m still trying. However, the success here is virtually non-existent.”

“Do you think there’s a way for me to help you?”

“No.” Danzo shook his head. “The problem lies in people. You see, we tried to raise civilian children capable of ingraining themselves within that scheme. However, every time they completed the civilian academic institution—which, should you wish to gain access to the royal court, is mandatory—the result was one and the same.”

“Which was…?”

“Defection.”

“Huh.” Sarutobi looked thoughtful. “Yet, judging by your reaction to these documents, it doesn’t seem to bother you much.”

“It doesn’t,” said Danzo.

“Why?”

“It doesn’t bother me because, after all, it was set up by Nidaime. And I believe he acted in Konoha’s best interests. Moreover, he explained to me, all those years ago, that it is only a backup plan in case his hypothesis on chakra degradation proves to be a theory.”

“It is certainly a liberating thought,” said Sarutobi, “but still, I would prefer it under control.” Danzo nodded at those words, their views clearly resembled one another. “Perhaps, we should tackle this issue together.”

“Perhaps we should.”

* * *

The city named Ran was quite a peculiar one. It was located on an island between the Land of Water and the Land of Honey. The island, while technically a part of the Land of Water, was largely affected by the culture of the neighboring country. Perhaps the most noticeable oddity was the architecture.

Usually, the buildings throughout the Land of Water were one, maybe two stories high. Very seldom one could encounter a building three stories high. The city of Ran was swarmed with buildings four or five stories high. The odd similarity was that a building three floors high was a rarity, which made one wonder: was it something with a number three?

Kurama, being upbeat and confident, suggested to split. She wanted to explore on her own. Her suggestion faced no objections from Tobirama. Fast-forward half an hour into the future and she was wandering through the nocturnal streets of the large city. She quickly found herself lost and lonely. What was she supposed to do? What was she _allowed_ to do? She reasoned that she should have asked that beforehand, Tobirama was nowhere to be found now… Or was he?

She could feel Tobirama’s unmoving presence. He was like a beacon among the sea of tiny specks of light. Again, she wondered about his origin. He was never a part of Ten-Tails, of that she was sure. Then how did he acquire the quality of chakra comparable to that of a Biju? Musing on whether she should ask him or not, she moved in the direction of his presence.

She found him on the rooftop peering over the edge, his forearms on the fence. He didn’t acknowledge her presence in any way, he was observing something. She moved closer and leaned on the fence beside him. Immediately, her attention was drawn to the center of the street.

There was a fire. It wasn’t an accidental fire, on the contrary, it was quite intentional and controlled. It was apparent that people were bringing out certain objects from the nearby building and throwing them into the fire. Looking closely, she was able to see that those objects were books.

Kurama was about to disrupt Tobirama’s contemplating, when she stopped, startled. At first, she didn’t quite comprehend what was that she felt, but a moment passed and she realized that for the first time she felt Tobirama’s emotions. It was faint but distinct, something that she could only describe as sadness. She didn’t like that, for not only could she feel it in him, apparently it was also affecting her. She needed to distract him. Her previous ponderings about the origin of all things, gods, and godly beasts, caused her to blurt out a rather unusual question.

“What’s god to you?” It was like an injection of confusion.

“Huh?” He turned to her.

“How do you define god?” She rolled with her improvised question.

“How do I define it… hmm.” Tobirama had contemplated that question long ago. He had his answer, but he needed several moments to put it into words. “There are things in the world that cannot yet be understood or controlled. Those things get to be called gods.”

“That’s not true,” came Kurama’s blunt response.

“Is it?” Tobirama chuckled. “Then how do you define it?”

“Obviously, it’s a person.”

“Of course,” he said. “So, there can only be one?”

“Don’t be silly.” She adopted a lecturing pose. “Everyone who eats the chakra fruit will become a god.”

“Uh-huh.” Tobirama was vaguely aware of the legend of the God Tree and the origin of chakra. “So, what does it give to an ordinary person that turns them into a god?”

“The ability to use chakra, obviously.” She nodded with every word. She looked at Tobirama, who raised an eyebrow at her response. “What?”

“From what you just said, it logically follows that every shinobi is a god.”

“Uh.” Her lecturing demeanor cracked. “That’s not right,” she muttered.

Tobirama shook his head and smiled. “I appreciate your attempt,” he said.

“Huh?”

“At distracting me.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” she promptly said.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to ask for quite some time now: do you like turtles?”

“Turtles?” Now it was Kurama’s turn to be confused. “What turtles?”

“Very big turtles,” he said. “Probably bigger than this building.” He tapped the fence. “I, for one, know about one that has three tails.”

“Oh.” Kurama realized that he was asking about Isobu. She tried replying in his manner. “I do like turtles,” she said, “but they don’t like me.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. They are very melancholic creatures,” she said. “That particular one you’ve mentioned is a paragon of pensive sadness.”

“I see, I see.” It was apparent to him that Kurama didn’t want to meet her sibling. “Why did you come back so fast? I thought you wanted to explore on your own.”

“Uh, well… I’ve realized that I don’t really know what to do…”

“Well, you can’t do much,” he said. “It’s three hours until dawn, the city’s asleep.”

“You could have said that beforehand,” she pouted.

“I’m sorry,” he chuckled, “you looked so confident. I didn’t want to discourage you.” Instinctively, he ruffled her hair.

The more time he spent with Kurama, the more he could see that she was very affectionate and fond of physical touch. This observation, however, raised a question: how did such a tender personality survive almost century-long isolation? Or was it the isolation that caused this yearning for physical touch? He was curious, but also astute. On several occasions, he had acknowledged that Kurama valued her past a lot. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t asked him about his. Tobirama wouldn’t push her, he would let her proceed at her pace.

“So, we wait till everyone wakes up… and then what?” Kurama wondered.

“Then we shall check out local tailors and ask whether they can recreate a certain yukata, and then there’s an educational structure in this city I want to check up on, and then… I don’t know. I suppose we’ll see.”


	19. Chapter 19

The round room was crowded, but the space in the middle was empty, well… almost. There was one person in the middle. She was chained, and manacled, and on her knees. Everyone around was watching her judgingly.

She tried meddling with the manacles but to no avail. The locks were tight, excluding any possibility of unwanted prying. She tried shouting, but the words wouldn’t come out.

“You shall speak when spoken to,” came a booming voice, seemingly from everywhere.

She jerked her head from side to side, trying to pinpoint the source of the voice, but her attempts were futile. If anything, she succeeded in confusing herself, for everyone around her appeared distorted and faceless. It looked as if they were behind a thin veil of mist. It was enough to cloud their appearances, but not enough to hide their silhouettes.

“What do you have to say in your defense?”

What _did_ she have to say in her defense? Now that she thought about it, she didn’t even know what she was accused of. In her attempts to find a wise answer, she stumbled upon the most generic one.

“I’m sorry,” said the childish voice. A moment later she realized that it was her voice. She looked at her hands, and indeed, they were hands of a child. That didn’t make any sense, she remembered herself as a grown-up woman. Silently, she started panicking.

“Tsunade Senju, you were found guilty of excessive alcohol consumption, and inexcusable financial irresponsibility,” said the voice. “For these dire crimes, you shall be condemned to… a year without sweets!”

“No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!” cried Tsunade.

* * *

Tsunade woke up with a cry of denial, her body soaked in a cold sweat. The room was bathing in the moonlight. Her cry had awoken another person within the building. That person came barging into the room.

“Tsunade-sama!” cried Shizune.

“I’m fine, Shizune.” Tsunade tried reassuring her pupil, but her voice faltered.

Those kinds of dreams were fairly frequent. They also had quite a strange recurring theme. It would be understandable if they were about her real-life regrets but weren’t. In fact, they were never about the atrocities she witnessed. Her nightmares, oddly enough, were always about how drinking and gambling had a bad influence on her life.

“Do you need medicine—”

“No!” Tsunade interrupted immediately. Shizune was referring to the sleeping pills and Tsunade vowed to never ever had them again. The last time she had tried it, the nightmare had still occurred with the only difference being that she hadn’t been able to wake up.

The setup surfaced in her memory. It took place in the studying hall of the Shinobi Academy. She was a sole present student, with her great uncle being the lecturer. The lecture was about the role of gambling in the present society. The worst part was that she couldn’t leave, she also couldn’t wake up. She had to endure through all of it.

Tsunade shuddered, “I’ll be fine, Shizune. Just go back to sleep.”

Shizune nodded hesitantly and left.

Tsunade slumped on the bed.

“ _Perhaps, the best part about these nightmares,”_ she thought, “ _is that occur only once a night.”_

* * *

“Combining fuinjutsu with genjutsu is quite tricky,” said Tobirama. “There are two ways to go about that. The first is to conjure fuinjutsu within genjutsu. Without going too deep into that, I’ll say that it’s very sophisticated and quite unnecessary. The second one is engineering genjutsu within fuinjutsu, which when taken to an extreme has unlimited potential.”

“Would you care for an example?” asked Kurama.

“Sure,” he said. “I believe it was fifteen years ago that I conducted an experiment to get a proof of concept. You see, I have a grand-niece. She’s quite a brilliant mind in the world of medicine. However, despite all her talent, she couldn’t escape a splinter of decay. To put it simply, she’s an alcoholic and a gambling addict.”

“Oh.” Kurama was not sure what to say. “That’s… unfortunate.”

“It most certainly is,” he said. “So, I came up with this seal that activates every time she goes to sleep. It checks for the alcohol in her blood or naughty thoughts about gambling and, based on the results, activates the genjutsu part, which usually appears in the form of a dream.”

“Did it cure her addictions?”

…

…

…

“Uh,” Tobirama seemed to have a hard time answering that question. “Well… I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” asked Kurama, incredulous.

“You see,” he started hesitantly, “the aim of the experiment was to get a proof of concept, to test whether it’s possible to combine fuinjutsu and genjutsu, while also tying it to some kind of outer-world trigger. Having succeeded in that, I sort of forgot about the secondary objective…” Having said that out loud, he realized that it was a very lame excuse.

“That was very inconsiderate of you.”

“I suppose.” He shrugged.

“Also,” she said. “Where’s this ‘unlimited potential’ you’ve referenced? Your example, for the lack of a better word, was quite anticlimactic. Is that the only possible application of this type of techniques?”

“No, absolutely not. That example was to merely to give you the basic understanding.” He paused, carefully considering his next words. “This principle of combining fuinjutsu and genjutsu lies in the heart of my ongoing project. If it succeeds, the world will be revolutionized.”

“What’s it about?”

“That,” he smiled mysteriously, “is a secret.”

“Does it have to do with those papers you’ve given to the Konoha shinobi?” Kurama was curious.

“Partially, yes.” He fell silent.

Kurama was silent too. She was eyeing Tobirama, clearly expecting him to elaborate. He was looking at her in return, but no words left his mouth. They continued like that for several minutes, until Kurama gave in.

“Hm.” She pouted. “It’s not like I wanted to know anyway.”

“I’ll tell you…” Tobirama waited for a reaction. Kurama looked at him hopefully. It was apparent that she did want to know. “…in due time,” he finished.

Now Kurama wanted to smack him.

Sensing that his life was in danger, Tobirama thought of possibilities to retreat. Fortunately for him, they were nearing the civilian school.

“Now is a good time to split,” he said. “I’ll find you in an hour.” With those words, he shamelessly left, disappearing in a swirl of leaves.

* * *

Orochimaru was slowly losing his cool. The papers lied scattered all over the floor. He was going through the description of Edo Tensei for the nth time. At this point, it was etched into his memory, yet he still couldn’t find a single clue applicable to the attaining of immortality. Frustrated, he threw the description away from his hand.

It was no wonder that he started doubting himself. To make things worse, there was another matter to attend to. This matter stood close enough to catch the thrown paper.

“What’s that?” she wondered.

Anko turned out to be a very curious child. If anything, her curiosity was exactly what attracted the Snake Sanin. Orochimaru considered himself to be just the right person to nurture that type of mind. However, now was probably not the best time to bother him.

“Nothing,” he said, irritated. He stopped himself and made a deep breath, he didn’t want to lash out on his long-awaited pupil. Meanwhile, Anko’s eyes landed on the top of the page.

“Why would you want to use something impure?” Immediately, she voiced her thoughts.

“What?” Orochimaru didn’t quite understand the question.

Anko shook the document in her hands. “It says right here that it’s ‘impure’. Wouldn’t you want to use the pure version of it?” she said. “Especially if it’s something like ‘reincarnation’.”

“Don’t be ridi—” he caught himself halfway through the word.

Anko’s innocent question started a peculiar chain of thoughts in Orochimaru’s mind.

“ _Obviously, there’s a reason behind that name,”_ said a voice in his head.

“ _Of course,”_ reassured another voice. “ _And that reason is…”_ he invited anyone who’s listening to answer. He was met with an unexpected silence. Orochimaru couldn’t quite comprehend why there was no answer.

“I…” he started, almost inaudibly. “I… don’t know?” A little giggle escaped his mouth. “I don’t know,” he repeated louder. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.” At this point, he embraced the mad laughter.

“ _There it is,”_ he thought. “ _My clue, it was in the name all this time. Clearly, if something is named impure, it will have a part that makes the whole thing impure. This means that all I have to do is find that part and, perhaps, purge it, because…”_ He trailed, savoring the thought. “ _The Pure Reincarnation is exactly what I seek.”_ The last thought triggered another wave of mad laughter.

Anko was staring. She was both scared and confused… that was until Orochimaru suddenly appeared directly in front of her, his hands on her shoulders, his snake-like eyes staring directly into her soul. Now she was just scared. 

“I-I-I’m s-s-sorry—” she tried to apologize but was rudely interrupted.

“Thank you.”

“H-huh?” she looked very confused and frightened.

“Your question,” said Orochimaru. “It gave me a clue to the solution of a riddle, which I’ve been trying to crack for quite some time now.” As he spoke, Anko almost calmed down, she was even able to fully grasp the meaning of his words.

“S-sure,” she started, unsure. “That was totally intentional,” as she continued, her voice grew more and more confident. “I absolutely did that on purpose,” to the point where she decided to double-down. “What’s my reward?”

* * *

His puppet-like body jerked, accepting the strings of his master. His eyes, although a part of his body, didn’t belong to him, nor did his voice. His mind craved for a command. Even his name, erased from his memory, existed only within others.

“Yagura-sama, they’re waiting.” The voice behind him sounded afraid.

He focused his gaze on the crowd below. The streets of Kiri were full. They were his army, and they were waiting for his orders.

Yagura had never been a man of a word. He had a history of choosing the bloodiest path to victory. Perhaps, it was a good thing that Yagura was no more, his body possessed by someone else. Perhaps, it was a good thing that his master was nothing like Yagura, hence he had quite a way with words. Surely, someone apt in rhetoric would be much preferred to a bloodthirsty maniac, right?

“Citizens of Kiri! Warriors! My people!” he began. His voice, amplified by chakra, boomed throughout the village.

“For years we have suffered under the rule of unworthy. They claimed that their blood was better, that they were destined to rule, that those like us would be always below them. Hear me out, people: those claims were lies!”

“Lies! Lies! Lies!” repeated the crowd.

“It is not we that are below them, it is they who are unnatural. They are fiends, they do not deserve forgiveness, it is our duty and destiny to destroy them! They shall have our revenge!”

“Revenge!” cried the crowd.

He raised his hand, and the crowd grew silent. “I was chosen to fulfill this destiny. Worry not, my people, for I shall cleanse our land from this pest. And after we are pure, I shall extend the boundaries of our great nation.” A silhouette of the three-tailed turtle appeared behind him. “I will use that as a weapon to control them… and then the world.

“I will create an empire that will endure for a millennium! Indestructible and eternal!”

The crowd went wild. He waited for their excitement to settle.

“It is to my knowledge that some of you have already taken matters in your own hands and started cleansing the farthest regions of our nation.” For a moment the crowd grew timid, not knowing how their leader would react, but their worries were for nothing. “For that I am thankful, you shall be rewarded.

“Listen closely, for I have only one order to give.” The crowd turned all ears. “I want everyone who possesses a shred of Bloodline Limit — gone. Let us purge our land. Give me blood and I shall give you freedom!”

“Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”


End file.
